Shortcuts to Big Flavor

I ❤️ seaweed, and if you happen to have missed my earlier seaweed-filled edition of this newsletter, please find a moment to catch up with Eric Kim’s recipe for creamy asparagus pasta. Today, we’re turning to an aguachile verde with sliced hearts of palm, avocado, cucumber and onion that uses seaweed to develop and build…

Easy Tomato Recipes

For those desperate to savor the last days of summer, the perfectly plump, impossibly juicy tomatoes at the market sure are tempting. So you lug home another few pounds of them, unable to resist but without a plan. Good news: New York Times Cooking has plenty of tomato recipes. Below are 23 that put the…

Summer Cocktail Recipes to Keep You Cool

A cooler’s primary summertime function is written directly into the name: It cools. The style of drink — often a lower-in-alcohol combination of liqueur or fortified wine mixed with a carbonated beverage — is served long and tall over plenty of ice, with the promise of some relief from the heat. Refreshing as it is…

How the Chile Became Hot

Capsaicin triggers TRPV1 receptors, the same ones that are primed to recognize temperatures above 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a baseline that may qualify as a brutal summer day but is not quite hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk or literally burn you. (In 2016, a case was reported of a man whose esophagus…

The Hottest Party Is at … the Farm

A field of flashy zinnias and cosmos swayed in the early evening breeze, and a bounty of zucchini, kale, peppers and tomatoes carpeted the fecund soil. Sean Pilger, who runs this 20-acre farm in Brookhaven, N.Y., a rural hamlet on the South Shore of Long Island, surveyed the 100 paying guests. They sat beneath pink…

What to See, Eat and Do in Berlin

No city was fun in the darkest days of the pandemic, but there may be nowhere that could compete with Berlin for sheer gloom during that first Covid winter. Even in good times, the city’s funereal grayness, its scant daylight and collective penchant for gallows humor and blunt negativity known as the Berliner Schnauze (literally:…