Five Weeknight Dishes: Herby orzo with a bright topping

By Emily Weinstein, The New York Times

If you only master two cooking fundamentals this summer, let it be these: cooking meat, fish, tofu and vegetables in utterly simple ways and making an easy sauce to go with them. Yewande Komolafe’s steak recipe brings both skills together in one dish, giving you instructions for grilling the meat and blending up a sauce of scallions, garlic, parsley and chiles. Likewise, Ali Slagle’s baked BBQ chicken comes down to properly roasting bone-in chicken leg quarters in a sticky-sweet blanket of barbecue sauce. Melissa Clark’s new orzo recipe leans on golden brown sautéed zucchini and pesto for instantaneous flavor.

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1. One-Pan Zucchini-Pesto Orzo

Keeping pe...