Good morning. Valentine’s Day is Friday, a Hallmark holiday for some, with cards and chocolates and roses of questionable provenance, dinners in candlelight, public displays of affection set to stun. If you’re celebrating, I hope you have your reservations made or your caviar order in. You don’t want to be scrambling around on Thursday or Friday morning, looking for ideas. When you serve a loved one this sandwich (above) for Valentine’s dinner, you don’t want it to be an improvisational jam. You want it to be a planned moment of louche luxury: actual decadence, sexy in the extreme.
All that’s in the future, though. For tonight, I don’t know that “sexy” describes this gingery fried rice with bok choy, mushrooms and basil from Alexa Weibel. Delicious might be the better word. But I do know it would make a fine dinner.
You may, however, prefer this seared scallop pasta with burst tomatoes and herbs. (I don’t think scallops can taste any better than they do this time of year, with water temperatures in the low 40s where my scallops reside.)
Or, maybe, khao soi? Daniela Galarza scored the recipe from the Los Angeles restaurant Noree Thaim and it’s fantastic.
Here’s a terrific, creamy one-pot pasta with chicken and mushrooms, from the irrepressible Mark Bittman. And an incredibly delicious recipe for orange beef from me. (I love this guy Andy who left a note on the recipe saying the second time he made it he didn’t have an orange or any fish sauce, “so I used a couple of tablespoons of orange marmalade and a tablespoon of hoisin, and a tablespoon of chili garlic sauce.” That sounds outstanding!)
You could make Colu Henry’s pasta a ceci soup. Or Alison Roman’s cumin-roasted salmon with cilantro sauce. Or J. Kenji López-Alt’s moo shu mushrooms.
In fact, thousands and thousands of recipes you could cook this week are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. (Yes, you need a subscription to access them. Subscriptions are our business model.) I hope you’ll go over there and browse, just as you might have walked through Abercrombie & Fitch a few generations ago, looking at shotguns and fly rods.
I hope you’ll come see us on Instagram while you’re at it. And that you’ll stream our videos on YouTube as well. We’re on Twitter, of course, as am I.
You can write for help if anything goes wrong along the way, either with your cooking or our technology: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you. Or you can write to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com.
Now, it’s nothing to do with roasting chickens, but I’d like you to read it anyway: Nicholas Lemann in The New York Review of Books, “Can Journalism Be Saved?”
Here’s Dave Holmes on Huey Lewis, in Esquire. (Holmes doesn’t mention it, but Lewis is a hell of a fly fisherman.)
Today’s the birthday of Tom and Jerry, which debuted on this day in 1940 with “Puss Gets the Boot.” (And here’s a recipe for the Tom and Jerry cocktail, which is even older.)
Finally, all this talk about Michael Chabon and “Star Trek: Picard” got me to watch the first episode and, O.K., but I was never a “Star Trek” guy. What you really ought to do this week? Read or reread Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” I’ll be back on Wednesday.