Good morning. When Alison Roman goes to the market this time of year, she buys fruit. All of the fruit. And then she cooks it, spending more time in her kitchen making desserts than she does at any other time of the year. She has, she says, no regrets about that.
She does have recipes, though, and jeepers do I want to make them in coming days, during the still-long evenings and all weekend long. So, for instance, here’s her summer pudding with blackberries and peaches (above), and her old-fashioned strawberry cake. Here’s a salted apricot-honey cobbler. She has a fine blueberry cornmeal shortbread tart. And I think frozen melon with crushed raspberries and lime is my new favorite song.
For dinner beforehand, perhaps you could cook without a recipe, and improvise off a theme. I’ll provide one: chicken teriyaki.
It doesn’t require a proper teriyaki sauce, and you needn’t marinate the chicken in it for hours and hours. Just go fast and weeknight furious: Combine soy sauce and brown sugar, grated garlic and ginger, a little cinnamon, and then heat it all through until the sugar dissolves. Sometimes I add a little slurry of cornstarch and water, other times a splash of orange juice, occasionally a shot of chile oil.
For the chicken, I use thighs — and on weeknights they’re skinless and boneless — dressed in the sauce and either quickly sautéed, broiled or grilled until crisp at the edges and soft within, which happens a little more quickly than you’d think. Serve over rice, drizzled with more of the sauce, with a load of chopped scallions and a drift of sesame seeds. Miso-glazed eggplant would be nice on the side.
Alternatively — you like recipes, like to follow them tight — I’ve got three ideas for your dinner this evening. Does a cherry tomato and white bean salad appeal? No? How about ramen carbonara? It is very hard to imagine anyone but that little kid who eats only Cheerios not thrilling to these spicy noodles with crisp tofu and spinach.
Thousands and thousands more recipes you could cook tonight or in coming days are on NYT Cooking. We do require a subscription to access them, just as you need one to the New York City Ballet if you want to eat dinner at the Grand Tier before the dance. Still, you can visit us for free on Instagram and Twitter. You can join our Facebook community. And you ought to come see what we’re up to on YouTube. (You’ll like watching Alison make chicken confit.)
Please write for help if you run into trouble with anything along the way: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We enjoy our lives in service. We will get back to you.
Now, please read Ginia Bellafante on “Dean & DeLuca, Barneys and the Fate of Bohemian Consumerism,” in The Times. Dean & DeLuca was a couple of blocks from my first newspaper, the late weekly NYPress, and if you went there a half-hour before closing they’d sell you fruit at half price and sometimes cheese or fish, and with a baguette and a bottle of wine you could make dinner at home that left you feeling as if you might be someone sophisticated and possibly in the art world, as if SoHo was a kind of Paris. I miss those dinners.
