Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Spaghetti and meatballs is hard to beat, I must say, but another unlikely family favorite for my family is satay and fried rice.

Definitely the Chronicles of Narnia - especially The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. The Turkish Delight, the fried fish at the Beavers', and the giant feast at the end of Caspian, with roasted sides of beef and boar...The descriptions of wine in that book engendered extreme disappointment when my parents let me taste the real thing. Luckily, I discovered sangria.

I'm sorry to break this to you, Ed, but your calorie count for one slice of pie is pretty unrealistic. Just to give you a ballpark, my mother's homemade apple pie with a regular top and bottom crust (flour, shortening, salt, and water), apples, sugar, cinnamon, and a little butter in the filling, is 430 calories for one slice. I did the math. So, just be careful out there, but still enjoy your Fourth of July weekend!

The real answer to saving time is simply to parboil your own rice ahead of time. You can even freeze parboiled rice if you need to keep it around longer. Then you, too, can have ten-minute rice pudding, but made with your own choice of ingredients.

New York Strip is always good, but a fine tenderloin is excellent as well. Tenderloin, or filet mignon, gets a lot of flack for being low in flavor, but if it's done correctly and the meat is good to start with, that's really not a problem.

While my faith in Cook's Illustrated is usually limitless and well placed, the turkey burger recipe is perhaps the only one that has let me down. I think it must be the strength of the Dijon flavor combined with the fluffiness that the ricotta adds to the ground turkey, but there's something both overwhelming and offputting about the mouthfeel of the finished product. The technique, however, of leaving the burgers untouched in the pan to form a crust on the bottom is really useful.

One of the best ways to save some time but still get a really fresh taste to things like soups and stews is to make the time-consuming part of the soup (stock, the meat and onion parts of stews, the harder, more resilient vegetables in vegetable soup) ahead of time, on the weekend, and divide it into portions and freeze or refrigerate. Then, during the week, you can take the heartier portion of the meal and add your delicate vegetables or spices and do a final finishing prep, and you won't get mushy overcooked veggies or pasta like you do when simply reheating. Works great for things like Minestrone, Chile Colorado, etc.