5 Ingredients or Fewer

You can transform this perfect crisp side salad into a main-course salad by slicing up any meat you like and tossing it on top. Or try it alongside Grilled Caesar Pork Tenderloin (page 89) or Down-Home Pinto Beans and Ham Hocks (page 127).

We don’t use much sesame oil in our cooking, but we love how a little bit gives your whole dish a nice nutty flavor. We were playing around with trying to re-create an Asian salad dressing we had in a restaurant when we struck gold with this combo. But don’t limit it to when you’re cooking up Asian-inspired food. It’s also great with tangy dishes like Double Orange Pork Chops (page 24) and Broiled Tuna with Pineapple-Chipotle Salsa (page 57).

We came up with this salad, inspired by traditional burger fixin’s, to eat alongside cheeseburger casserole. It’s a match made in heaven. Try it with Turkey and Black Bean Burgers with Corny Salsa (page 44) or our Grilled Sausage, Pepper, and Onion Sub Sandwich (page 84).

This sweet, kid-friendly recipe (one of Jack’s all-time favorites) is like a cross between candied yams and steak fries—and it’s healthier than both! It’s also terrific with Balsamic-Glazed London Broil (page 15) and The Ultimate Spice-Rubbed Rib Steak (page 81).

Our Aunt Peggy doesn’t serve a meal without this delicious salad. She sometimes makes a variation with banana peppers or bell peppers added in. It’s such a simple, healthy side, and all you need to get dirty is your cutting board and one bowl. Its fresh garden flavor is a terrific complement to the spicy rice or just about any main course in the book, but we especially love it with Honey Mustard Baked Chicken (page 33) and any kind of pork chop (pages 22, 23 and 24).

As a kid, whenever he got the chance, Bobby ate those store-bought oatmeal pies. These are his “grown-up” version.

It has been successfully argued that these soda fountain favorites are a good source of protein—after all, they’re full of milk and peanut butter. We try to drink them regularly for that reason alone.

Warm, boozy cherries over ice cream is a classic dessert, and it’s so easy to do. We like ours over chocolate ice cream (but when Bobby doesn’t quite have the energy to make this, you know he’s always got Cherry Garcia in the freezer).

We heard about peanut butter–topped Ritz cracker treats from a friend in the Midwest. This is our down-South version, tricked out with both jam and chocolate.

Bobby’s dream is to retire to a beach in the Caribbean and sell frozen chocolate-covered bananas on a stick (see A Bit More, Y’all). He’d be open from noon to one, just long enough to eat lunch and read the paper. The hoped-for sales for each day would be six bananas. Seeing how this dream is not coming true any time soon, he’ll just have to settle for these island-inspired delights. We roll them in coconut for that tropical taste, and since they’re mostly fruit, they’re a pretty healthy dessert or snack. For an extra-special treat, roll them in the crushed candy or cookie topping of your choice.

Jack could eat fruit all day long, especially berries. He is enamored with different colors and shapes, so to set them off, we love to make him these sweet, jiggly salads. We serve them at playdates with his friends Lex, Brady, and Colin (they’re triplets, y’all) and make a game of digging up the fruit in the Jell-O (yup, with their hands—it’s messy!).

Mama used to make us cheese toasts and cinnamon toasts for breakfast. (She would leave the oven door open after making them, so we could warm up on chilly mornings.) We started to play with that for Jack, and came up with these tasty cream cheese sandwiches sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. They taste a bit like a cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese, but the crunch of the sugar on the outside and the creamy cheese inside make them way more interesting. Plus the cream cheese adds protein, so they’re heartier than your average serving of cinnamon toast.

Unless you’re Jamie Deen, you probably need to have a kid around to make yourself one of these melty, divine sandwiches. Add banana instead of jam and you’ve got yourself Elvis’s favorite sandwich.

So many kids only want to eat mac and cheese right from the box. We decided to come up with an alternative dish for Jack—one where Mom and Dad are in charge of quality control. Jack always cleans his plate, so we have to be quick if we want to sneak a few pieces for ourselves!

Brooke is a huge Mexican food fan. In fact, when Jack was one week old, Brooke had such a mean craving that we took him out to a Mexican spot near us. So it’s no surprise that Jack has become a big fan, too. And since quesadillas are pretty much Mexican grilled cheese, we make them just to give him a little variety, and use them as an opportunity to get a little avocado (which is chock-full of vitamins and has more potassium than a banana) into his diet.

We’ve never met a kid who doesn’t love grilled cheese—with extra-gooey cheese, please! We like to slip in some tomato, too, which some kids won’t eat otherwise. And let’s be honest here: You may as well make yourself one of these while you’re at it; otherwise your kid’s sandwich doesn’t have a chance.

When we were kids, we would go on camping trips and eat beanie-wienies out of the pull-top can and pretend to be cowboys. We thought that was just the best thing in the world to eat. When your kids try these, they will, too. Nowadays it’s easy to find healthier versions of traditional hot dogs (nitrate-free or turkey, chicken, or soy dogs) and lower-sodium baked beans in most supermarkets. Try a few different varieties and see which ones your kids like most.

We owe enormous thanks to our slow cooker for making it possible to turn our absolute favorite weekend treat, barbecued pork, into a four-ingredient recipe we can throw together for a weeknight. We love to make sandwiches with the soft, flavorful shredded pork on hamburger buns, and serve them with some Lemony Coleslaw with Raisins (page 116), on top or alongside.

You can order yourself a grilled chicken Caesar anywhere. But we figured we could jazz up that combo a little while still keeping it fairly healthful if we swapped in tender slices of grilled pork instead. The smoky, juicy pork and crunchy, tangy salad is a uniquely delicious pairing, if we do say so ourselves. We love to serve it with our Grilled Cheesy Olive Bread (page 90), but then again, we love just about anything with that bread!

A lemony butter sauce infuses these shrimp with a flavor that is perky and decadent all at once. You’ll be tempted to serve it over all your seafood dishes. But look out! You may find yourself talking in a Georgia drawl by the end of the meal. Serve this dish with white rice or Easy Almond Rice Pilaf (page 47) for a no-fuss fancy meal.