Good morning. This is it. This is the end of the session. Summer’s not going to be taking any more questions. Labor Day comes tomorrow, and the day that follows will be hard shoes and school buses and the long slog toward the fourth quarter, holidays stacked like cordwood along the way. Celebrate this day as you may! Celebrate tomorrow just as joyfully.
So, burgers! Grilled corn. The incredible market tomatoes we’re seeing right now, sliced and served with anchovy toasts, or laid out à la Niçoise, or planked with basil and mozzarella in a caprese salad. Strive for endless summer: clam dip and your favorite potato chips, the best sausages, carne asada, hummus tehina and an Atlantic Beach pie for dessert.
Cook something simple or grand, but cook and share it with others and eat outside if you can. Try a new recipe. Melissa Clark brought us one this week for a super-cool, gâteau-Bretonish plum tart (above). For some, it might make a brilliant new addition to the Rosh Hashana table, set a week from tonight.
Another new recipe: David Tanis’s summer vegetable salad, which takes advantage of the bounty of the farmers’ fields in these late summer days.
And yet one more, for tomorrow, if you’re game: Samin Nosrat’s ambitious shrimp boil, as much a technique as a recipe, which she was taught by Jared Austin, a New Orleans riverboat pilot whose cooking draws hundreds to his door. Samin wrote about it for The New York Times Magazine this week.
That’s today and tomorrow taken care of, then. Tuesday’s for leftovers and Wednesday for getting takeout or calling in a delivery, or for defrosting that clam chowder you made in July and slurping it in front of the second season of “Ozark” on Netflix.
Thursday night: Kay Chun’s baked cod with miso-butter bread crumbs.
And then you might round out the week with a lazy night of making Alison Roman’s vegetarian tortilla soup. As many cooks have noted on the recipe, you could always add some canned beans for protein. Your soundtrack in any event: Café Tacvba, “La Ingrata.”
There are a gajillion other recipes to consider cooking this week on NYT Cooking. Of course you’ll need a subscription to see and save them all, just as we need you to subscribe so that we might stay employed. (Ours is what the science teachers call a symbiotic relationship, an example of mutualism.) Holler if that doesn’t seem fair to you: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I do try my best to respond to all who write. (If you’re having a technical issue, however, with your subscription or with a particular recipe, write the good doctors at cookingcare@nytimes.com. They respond to all and are amazingly helpful.)
Now, nothing to do with Fritos or ranch dressing, but I am really enjoying my odyssey through the Expanse series of space novels by James S.A. Corey.