Good morning. One of my favorite recipes in our collection comes from Julia Reed, the elegant New Orleans writer and cook. It’s for a simple supermarket-and-farmstand summer-squash casserole (above), Mr. Roast Chicken’s friendliest table companion. Yes, there are Ritz crackers in there, and white toast crumbs as well. You’ll be into it or you’ll get over it once you taste what happens when they combine with the eggs and cheese and jalapeño, against the sweet flesh of the squash. Add a peach upside-down cake, and you’ve got your top-tier Sunday dinner plans all set.
Here’s what to eat this week. Maybe go meatless on Monday with some mushroom shawarma, portobellos treated as lamb. There’s plenty on the plate, but I might make Samin Nosrat’s salad-e shirazi to go along with it.
Tuesday night, you can make like the pasta detective Ian Fisher and cook spaghetti carbonara, one of our most popular recipes and the product of an immense amount of work on Ian’s part, both in Rome, where he was a correspondent for The Times, and back in the United States, where he practiced carbonara all the time, until he could write the recipe with pure and unadulterated confidence. It has more than 2,700 five-star ratings. Go to!
Head to the other side of the globe for dinner on Wednesday night, and make the Hawaiian dish loco moco, which will — I’m guessing — go into regular rotation for you, unless you think it’s too heavy for a midweek meal. In which case: wedge salad!
Glazed black cod with bok choy, ginger and oyster sauce for dinner on Thursday, please, and you can bake peanut butter and paprika cookies afterward to make someone’s day brighter.
And then slide into Friday with some grilled chicken Parm, or Cuban black beans, or pasta with fried lemons and chile flakes. Cook’s choice!
There are thousands and thousands more ideas for what to cook this week on NYT Cooking. (Here’s how to subscribe.) There are even more on our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. And we’re big on Pinterest now, too. Come visit.
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Now, it’s not butchery or pick-your-own fruit, but the nice woman running the newish McNally Jackson bookstore in Terminal B at La Guardia Airport put me on to Caz Frear’s “Sweet Little Lies” for my flight the other day and I owe her some thanks. It’s a dark and smart page-turner.
Here’s Tobe Nwigwe, “Heat Rock,” for your listening and viewing pleasure.
The great Laura Lippman has a letter of recommendation in The New York Times Magazine this week that you ought to read, for double boilers. Move on to her new novel, “The Lady in the Lake,” when you’re done.
Finally, how about a video recipe? This is one-pot pasta with ricotta and lemon. Smooth jazz! You can cook that, too. I’ll be back tomorrow.
