Dress up plain spaghetti with basic pantry staples. Tuna and Kalamata olives give the dish a rich, Mediterranean flavor, and homemade breadcrumbs add a simple crunch.

Prep time: 25 minutes

Total time: 25 minutes

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Salad for dinner has never been so fulfilling with this refreshing mix filled with protein-rich steak and roasted peanuts. The best part is that steak is just as tasty cold: Save some for lunch tomorrow or later in the week.

Prep time: 25 minutes

Total time: 25 minutes

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With this simple recipe you can make crunchy, tender fried chicken right in your own kitchen. Skip the takeout and enjoy this comfort food classic tonight.

Prep time: 45 minutes

Total time: 45 minutes, plus marinating

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Sacrifice the fat but not the flavor: these tender baked shrimp are crunchy without all the weight of heavy grease, making for a light and delectable dinner.

Prep time: 30 minutes

Total time: 30 minutes

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Have you ever wondered who baked the first chocolate chip cookie? How about how coffee came to be a popular beverage? The answers to these questions and other food fun facts are comedically explained in Josh Chetwynd's How the Hot Dog Found its Bun. Chetwynd explores happy accidents of the food world, such as why bubblegum is pink and who served the first plate of nachos. Equal parts history and trivia, the book answers food questions you didn't even know you had (and debunks a few myths along the way). Here are some of our favorite tidbits...

1. Wheaties were invented when a health clinician from Minnesota accidentally dripped gruel onto a hot stove. The resulting flakes eventually morphed into what we now know as The Breakfast of Champions.

2. The first cheese puff came from a livestock feed machine used to make rabbit food.

3. And the first chocolate chip cookie? That honor goes to Ruth Graves Wakefield, who ran out of nuts to add to her butter cookies one day at her inn (called the Toll House). She promptly broke up a Nestlé chocolate bar with an ice pick, and you can guess what happened next. That year Nestlé began selling their chocolate in "morsel" form with Wakefield's recipe printed on the bag. The rest was history.

This recipe makes one drink, but you can easily scale it up for any number of people by simply combining the ice, alcohol, and lemon juice in a large pitcher, then letting everyone add soda and garnishes to taste. That's what we did today! Here we are enjoying a happy-hour toast. Happy weekend!

The hearty chickpeas and protein-packed tuna make this savory salad a perfect anytime meal. Make a large batch tonight and have the rest for lunch later in the week.

Prep time: 15 minutes

Total time: 15 minutes

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Clockwise from upper-left: brown rice, corn, potato-rice-soy blend, quinoa

Have you noticed how many gluten-free options there are at the supermarket lately? There was a 37% increase in the number of GF products in grocery stores last year, according to a Nielsen report. It makes avoiding gluten easy, but the options can be overwhelming! I wrote a guide to cooking with gluten-free pasta for our May issue, and we tested a few popular pasta types in the process. The type you use really boils down to your personal preference, but our test kitchen's favorite was the blend of potato starch, rice flour, and soy flour from bionaturae. My favorite factoid I learned while writing the item was about the most popular type of gluten-free noodles—rice pasta...

Rice pasta makes for horrible leftovers! Rice contains amylose starch, which it hardens as it cools. This reaction is what makes leftover rice perfect to use in fried rice (the grains won't stick together or get soggy when you cook them), but it's also what makes refrigerated rice pasta so stiff and cardboard-like. Better to boil up small amounts of rice pasta at a time to avoid wasting later on.

What's your favorite type of gluten-free pasta?

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1 The view from inside the shop.

2 The Burren's limestone landscape

3 The sweet selection

4 I tried the hazelnut ripple flavor - dreamy!

5 Don't forget to say "thanks" as you leave...

My new favorite take on the farm-to-table trend is "cow-to-cone," as exemplified by this sweet shop I stopped into on a recent trip to Ireland. Linnalla Pure Irish Ice Cream pops up in the midst of the Burren, a rocky Irish coastline that stands in stark contrast to the rest of the country's rolling green hills. The ice cream here is made with milk that comes from the herd of cows right behind the shop so, as you sit and enjoy your scoop, you can see the cows grazing all around you. Food doesn't get much more local than that!

In this simple recipe, the savory juices from a whole roasted chicken drip down to to coat the vegetables below it. The flavors are incredible, and using a broiler pan to cook both the chicken and veggies makes for a quick clean-up.

Prep time: 15 minutes

Total time: 50 minutes

Click here for recipe.