Good morning. New York’s starting to empty out, all the therapists decamping for the Cape and islands, the novelists down the shore, accountants to the Dells, engineers to float camps in the Bob. Among many other things, it’s a great time to find parking.
Me, I’m holding down the fort in the kitchen for a few more days, and I’m going big on blender meals just as if I lost my teeth in a fight: a watermelon-and-lime smoothie for breakfast (the juice of one lime for every quarter of a basketball-sized watermelon); Julia Moskin’s gazpacho for lunch. I make it in bulk. In the heat, it beats cooking.
Except that it doesn’t, really. I like to cook even if it makes the kitchen feel like a sauna. So, come dinnertime, I’ll be spinning through our site then heading off to the store for ingredients, same as I do in January.
You could do the same, but I’ll prime the pump with a few ideas of my own. You could serve BLT pasta (above) tonight. You could make Spanish-style shrimp with garlic. You could make oyakodon, the Japanese chicken-and-egg rice bowl.
Now, it’s a ferry to the subway to a bus ride away from the kitchen, but here’s “Enlightenment,” William Pei Shih’s new short story in the Virginia Quarterly Review.
This is very important, if not exactly current, harvest mouse content. Relatable!
Here’s Adam Platt, the restaurant critic for New York magazine, on the sad desk salad.
Holy moly, this poor woman with in-laws careless about her deadly food allergy, in The Cut.
Finally, today is, in Britain, the Glorious Twelfth, a celebration of the start of grouse-hunting season. So here’s some 1922 footage of gunners heading into the fields with their dogs. Good dogs! See you on Wednesday.
