BLTs | Potato Chips | Watermelon Slices | Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches

Whether or not you’re in vacation mode this week, a picnic for dinner makes life feel more vacation-y. You can go fancy, adding avocado, arugula and artisan bread to your BLT and making your own potato chips, or you can go super easy, buying cooked bacon, kettle chips, and pre-sliced watermelon. You can make the ice cream sandwiches with or without making the ice cream and cookies from scratch; just soften a tub of your favorite flavor, drop a big scoop between two big Pepperidge Farm cookies, and you’re set.

Love to Cook: How about Candied Bacon with a Garlic-Basil Aioli for your gourmet BLT? And even if you’re not a Ree Drummond fan, her recipe for homemade potato chips is simple and reliable. Here’s another plug for the two-ingredient, no-churn ice cream, if you have time to make it in advance. You can flavor with vanilla (or lavender, or whatever).

Weeknight Reality: How about a BLT salad instead of traditional sandwich? The total time is almost an hour, but most of that is bacon cooking time. You could easily trim the time by buying cooked bacon (even candied bacon, for an extra zing). For the ice cream sandwiches, buy ice cream and big cookies and let people assemble their own.

Need a Miracle: If you want to make it look like you did more work than you had time to do, upgrade the ingredients for your BLTs and serve them like a salad bar for people to assemble their own (avocado, candied bacon, micro greens, flavored mayo, etc.). Ditto for the chips, ice cream and cookies, although you could also just buy old-fashioned ice cream sandwiches and probably please just about everyone you’re serving.