The best weeknight recipes are unfussy, quick, and come with a relatively short ingredient list. After all, the last thing anyone feels like doing after work is spending a few more hours working on dinner.

If you're looking for some inspiration to add new delicious dinner recipes to your weeknight routine, we asked our editors which cookbooks they lean on for meals that are fast, tasty, and exciting. One of our favorites is Family: New Vegetarian Comfort Food to Nourish Every Day. This beautiful cookbook offers a new spin on vegetarian comfort food that the whole family will enjoy.

To help you narrow down your choices, here are our editors' picks for the best cookbooks for weeknight recipes.

1- Family: New Vegetarian Comfort Food to Nourish Every Day


This beautifully illustrated vegetarian cookbook is by Australia-born, Brooklyn-based cook and food writer Hetty McKinnon. The cookbook is rooted in multicultural comfort food inspired by family meals, traditions, and rituals. McKinnon offers simple yet innovative ways to present vegetarian dishes to children and other reluctant eaters.

The author also provides a family pantry wishlist and a detailed index organized by individual ingredients. The book is 288 pages with 185 color illustrations. In addition to recipes, the book is filled with family stories from home cooks across the globe.

"I love that it's vegetable-centric but isn't just a bunch of ho-hum salads and grain bowls. Hetty's like, the queen of exciting salads. My absolute favorite recipe from the book is the tomato and walnut pesto, which I'll whip up and put on pasta, toast, eggs, you name it..."–Oset Babür-Winter, Senior Drinks Editor

2- Keepers: Two Home Cooks Share Their Tried-and-True Weeknight Recipes and the Secrets to Happiness in the Kitchen


"Written by two former Saveur editors, Keepers became an immediate favorite of mine when it was published in 2013, and has remained one of my most frequently-used cookbooks over the past seven years. The book's organizing principle is simple: these are the recipes that the writers (both food magazine editors and parents of young children) considered "keepers"—dependable, delicious recipes that could be made on a weeknight and were good enough to make over and over again. The 120 dishes are work night- and kid-friendly, use ingredients that you probably already have in the fridge (or can get without any trouble), but are still deeply delicious and interesting enough to hold an adult's interest. (I keep Keepers' fragrant, brothy Japanese-style stew of ginger, brown sugar, and soy sauce-laced ground beef and root vegetables; and chicken thighs in a zippy lemon, garlic, and smoked paprika marinade, on heavy rotation)." –Karen Shimizu, executive editor

3- Just Cook It!: 145 Built-to-Be-Easy Recipes That Are Totally Delicious


"I'm not just saying I love his cookbook because he's a friend and colleague; I really do love it and I've got the stains in my book to prove it! Justin is the master of super quick recipes, relying on only a few smart ingredients, that taste like so much more than the sum of their parts. His shaved cauliflower & radicchio salad with yogurt caesar is now a staple in my fridge, and his roasted chicken legs with sourdough bread and poblanos sets the standard for sheet pan meals (and you can assemble it the night before!)." –Kelsey Youngman, associate food editor

4- Now & Again: Go-To Recipes, Inspired Menus + Endless Ideas for Reinventing Leftovers


"I love the way Julia plans out menus, so you know exactly how to pair each dish, and when to prep each component. But hands down, the best part is the way she reinvents each meal's leftovers—roasted chicken becomes chicken salad, stuffed mushrooms show up again in penne ai fungi, and a ricotta frittata becomes sandwiches." –Caroline Schnapp, audience engagement editor

5- Canal House: Cook Something: Recipes to Rely On


"Hirsheimer and Hamilton are the patron saints of simple home cooking. I rely on them for simple, but delicious ideas for dinner, and plenty of hard-won kitchen wisdom. Recipes veer toward country-style French/Italian, with many ideas for dinner-friendly eggs (with chorizo, with asparagus, with mushrooms), lots of tasty things to spread on toast for a quick meal (tuna and lemony mayo, blue cheese butter), and long-simmering things that make the kitchen smell wonderful (cinnamon and chile-rubbed brisket, vinegar-braised chicken)." –Adina Steiman, deputy digital editor

6- Cooking for Jeffrey: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook


"Ina Garten's Cooking for Jeffrey is a classic, filled with approachable recipes that are simple enough to make on a weeknight but still have pizzazz, like maple-roasted carrot salad and butternut squash and ricotta bruschettas." –Nina Friend, assistant editor

7- Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners


"When my first extremely stained-up copy of The Lee Bros. paean to Southern cooking was lost in an apartment flood, I couldn't stand to chuck it in the trash. It had seen me through countless meals of collard greens, country captain, chicken and dumplings, corn cob wine, and watermelon rind preserves, with solid weeknight basics and Sunday flourishes that added an extra octave to my range, and it deserved a more dignified method of dispatch. I dried it out, lit the grill, and gave it a Viking funeral. Then I made biscuits." –Kat Kinsman, senior editor