Q: What's a good dinner for a night when you don't feel like cooking at all?

A: First of all, we don't count boiling water as cooking, so pasta is included in no-cook nights. There are lots of toppings which don't require any cooking at all. There's also a great sauce called crudiola that consists of chopped tomatoes mixed with a little pesto—or you can use torn-up basil leaves—and cheese. Another favorite is ricotta, salt, pepper and olive oil, tossed with pasta. If you really want to spice it up, you can add some crushed red pepper flakes.

You can also pile a platter with marinated vegetables, cheese, crackers, sliced bread, olives and dried fruit, and have that for a quick & easy dinner.

Hard salami is perfect for sandwiches which you can make Italian-style with cheese, German-style with mustard, or you can do it French with a little butter on the bread. A hard, salty salami goes well with crusty bread.

As for salads, try sliced tomato salads in summer, and sliced fennel salads with oranges, salt, pepper, olive oil and green olives in the winter. Chickpea salad is another good one. Drain and rinse your chickpeas and place in a bowl. Add chopped celery, pitted black olives, oregano, olive oil, and vinegar. You can also cut raw zucchini into cubes and add that, as well as pomegranate seeds and artichoke hearts. If you just make a big salad with chickpeas as the base, don't add vinaigrette till the end or the chickpeas will get hard.

Stale bread is a good item to have on hand. You can slice it really thin, toast it in the oven and then eat it with soup and everything else. It's kind of like bread-crackers, which makes them good for dipping, too.

And don't forget to open a bottle of wine on no-cook nights.

-- Food Network Kitchens