Lean turkey doesn't have to be dry

Makes one full pan in about 35 minutes: dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow, or one big dinner if that is where your appetite lands today. The whole pan holds roughly 110g of protein.

Grate the zucchini on the large holes of a box grater, toss it with a half teaspoon of salt, and leave it in a colander for ten minutes. Then squeeze it hard in your fist over the sink. You want it damp, not wet.

Mix the zucchini into the turkey with the egg, the parmesan, the panko, the garlic, a big pinch of salt and plenty of pepper. Use your hands and stop as soon as it comes together. Roll twelve meatballs, each about the size of a golf ball.

Get a large skillet hot with olive oil over medium heat. Brown the meatballs on two or three sides, about 6 minutes total, then turn the heat to low, cover the pan and give them 6 minutes more. Move them to a plate.

Heat back up, another spoonful of oil, and the green beans in a single layer. Leave them alone for 3 minutes so they blister, then toss and give them 2 more. Salt them, squeeze half the lemon over the pan, and set the meatballs back in.

Why this works: salting and squeezing the zucchini first is what keeps it from flooding the pan. What is left is still mostly water, but that water is now trapped inside the meatball and released slowly as it cooks. Lean turkey has no fat to do that job, so the zucchini does it.

The meatballs keep 4 days and reheat well in a covered pan with a splash of water. The green beans do not, so cook those the night you want them.

No recipe, just an order of operations, and worth doing while the melons are still good. Cut a quarter of a cantaloupe into thick wedges and take the rind off. Tear two ounces of fresh mozzarella into rough pieces over the top. Drape two ounces of prosciutto across it loosely, so it sits in folds instead of lying flat.

Crack a lot of black pepper over everything and leave the salt alone. The prosciutto is carrying all of it already. Roughly 22g of protein.

Beef jerky and a cold, crisp apple eaten together is what I keep in the car this time of year. The jerky is salty and takes a long time to chew, the apple is sweet and wet, and neither one needs a refrigerator to survive an afternoon.

Rather than stirring cheese into a bowl of canned soup, beat an egg in a cup and pour it into the pot in a thin stream while the soup is at a low simmer, stirring the whole time. It sets into soft ribbons and vanishes into the broth. One large egg brings 6g of protein, and the soup comes out silkier instead of heavier.

In the dairy case, look at the ultra-filtered milk in the tall bottles beside the regular gallons. A cup of it carries 13g of protein against 8g in a cup of whole milk, it is lactose free, and it behaves exactly like milk in coffee, in oatmeal, and in anything you would blend.

There are nine amino acids your body cannot build for itself, so they have to arrive in food. Meat, eggs, dairy and fish show up carrying all nine in useful amounts. Most plants come up short on one or two: beans run low on methionine, grains run low on lysine. You do not have to solve that at every single meal. Eating a mix of sources across a normal day covers it, which is the quiet argument for the parmesan in those meatballs and for beans sitting next to rice. Variety does work that no single food does alone.

For the day this week when cooking is not going to happen: pull a handful of meat off a store rotisserie chicken, drop it into a mug of hot broth with a spoonful of tiny pasta, and let it sit two minutes. Warm, salty, soft enough to get down easily, and the chicken is doing real work in there.