Happy Sunday, and welcome to Kitchn’s Week Off, our first-ever collective staff vacation. While we have generous individual paid time off here at Apartment Therapy Media, I’ve been reflecting for a long time on how the work of digital media — especially when you write about food, which we live with every day in our own kitchens — is tough to shut off. Even when you feel like you should be taking a break, it can feel hard to completely disconnect. Maybe it would be easier if we all took a break together?
It has been a personal goal of mine to give our staff a full week off collectively, as a joyful midsummer break to cut loose and get refreshed, without the worry of missed meetings or looming deadlines.
So this week is it: Kitchn’s Week Off. The kitchen, as my grandmother’s old magnet says, is closed. Clean up after yourself! But we left a Tupperware in the fridge for you. We’re taking our week off literally in our content and have prepped you new favorite easy, breezy, week-off meals. These are the things we eat when we’re taking it easy: grocery store hacks and cheap and easy ways to feed yourself without breaking the bank at a restaurant. Think summertime-friendly snack dinners and smart freezer finds.
Here’s some of what you’ll see this week: Mara, our groceries editor, shares her favorite summer salad kit. Michelle, our kitchens editor, waxes eloquent on her gluten-free staple for dinner sandwiches. Nicole, our associate food editor, shares the Ghanaian pepper sauce that makes her favorite low-effort dinner sing. I wrote about my own 10-minute air fryer grocery hack (one that is a bit fancy, in a pleasing way). And on it goes — meals to fuel your own days off this summer.
Recipes are not completely absent; we’ll have roundups of our summer favorites. Plus, as a treat later this week: Thao Thai guest edited some short and sweet essays for us on the dishes that reminded two writers of their first summer loves.
Quick and easy meals, budget-friendly and practical — AND summer flings. Now that’s a week off! I hope you still visit and think of us this week, but also that you, too, are headed for some R&R this summer. We all need it so much.
I’ll send you off with some little joys and inspirations that I am loving this summer.
