Good morning. It’s Monday, and I hope you’ve got a full bottle of red wine at the ready. You’re going to need it to make dinner. That’s right, put on a big pot of salted water, because it’s red wine spaghetti night! (Are there four better consecutive food words than “red wine spaghetti night”? I don’t think so.)
David Tanis has the recipe for spaghetti ubriachi (above), or drunken pasta, and it starts with rendering the fat from some pancetta, then using it to sweat onion and garlic, red-pepper flakes and tomato paste. The wine reduces quickly to make a tangy, burgundy-colored sauce, and then all the dish needs is butter and cheese and a handful of basil leaves. Make sure to get another bottle to drink with dinner, of course.
On to sweets! Melissa Clark has not one, but three (three!) new recipes for snacking cakes this week. If you’ve got some soft, blackening bananas on the counter, a bit past their prime, they’ll be perfect for her buttery banana cake, covered with a salty, sticky caramel glaze.
But if your bananas are still firm and yellow, you might want to bake something else today, like her bittersweet chocolate cake with a citrus glaze (tangerines, mandarins, whatever you’ve got will work great). Baking with oil, instead of butter, makes the crumb on this especially soft and tender (and means it keeps really well, too, if you’re baking for the next day). And if even sharper citrus desserts are your jam, the gorgeous lemon cake made with tons of grated zest and covered with coconut glaze might be the way to go.
We’ve got more on NYT Cooking — like red lentils with coconut-lime kale, and caramelized scallion noodles and a wonderfully thick pizza you can bake at home in a sheet pan. You’ll need to subscribe to access all of our recipes (there are many thousands of them!), and leave notes for fellow cooks about how you adapt them, or what tricks you’ve learned. If anything goes sideways, please send us a note at cookingcare@nytimes.com, and someone on our team will get back to you.
Andrea Nguyen is right: One bottle of fish sauce isn’t enough. Read her story on Taste about why she has at least a dozen in the pantry and then consider expanding your own collection.
“My name is Tunde Wey. I am Nigerian. I am a cook. I am here trying to sell chicken for enormous amounts of money.” Read Brett Martin’s profile of Wey in GQ.
You know what I can’t wait to start? Valeria Luiselli’s new novel, “Lost Children Archive,” which our book critic Parul Sehgal describes as “a retelling of the American road novel, with a twist.”
See you Wednesday!
