Good morning. Our Ligaya Mishan has a beautiful article in The Times today about the Filipina food writer Doreen Gamboa Fernandez, who died in 2002 but whose work is right now inspiring a new generation of cooks and restaurateurs. “She revolutionized Filipino food,” Ligaya wrote, “simply by treating it as what it is: a cuisine.”
It made me want to make chicken adobo (above), pork sinigang, kare-kare, bibingka and lugaw. It makes me want to put together a mango royale.
And I will make something off that list, if the coming weekend unspools as I want it to, without the drama of a blown water heater or some nonsense with the gutters, Uber duty for children caught in a swirling vortex of soccer games, birthday parties, beach trips and babysitting gigs. (It will! I can visualize it!)
But tonight, halfway through the week, overheated on August’s eve, I need a quick and easy dinner, delicious, nothing fancy. And for that, Alison Roman always answers, every time. I love her latest recipe, for pasta with zucchini, feta and fried lemon because as good as it is warm from the stove, it’s maybe even better at room temperature. It’s one of those dishes you can make as soon as you get home and it doesn’t matter if the person you want to share it with and love most in the world is home late again, without calling again, just like clockwork. No worries! It’s right there on the countertop, good to go.
Is even that too much for you, this time of the week? Would you prefer a no-recipe recipe, a dish so easy you don’t need exact instructions but only some ingredients and prompts? Make a hero. I did, kind of Philadelphia-style. I sautéed onions and peppers in olive oil until they were something close to caramelized. In another pan, I sizzled hot Italian sausages. When the sausages were basically done, I stirred a whole bunch of chopped chard into the peppers and onions and let that wilt down. Then I put the vegetables into toasted hero rolls, with slices of provolone on top, and the sausages. That’s a really nice dinner, right there.
But so too is a platter of cod cakes. So too is avocado salad with herbs and capers. So too is pan-roasted eggplant with peanut-chile sauce.
There are in fact thousands of recipes that may appeal to you waiting on NYT Cooking, at least once you’ve taken out a subscription to our site and apps. Just click on over there to see what’s of interest, then save the recipes you want to make in your Recipe Box (mine now has nearly 1,000!).
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Now, it doesn’t have anything to do with food except the subject came up at dinner: You ever read “Wiseguy,” by Nick Pileggi? It’s one of those pieces of journalism that’s better than the movie Martin Scorsese would make out of it, which in this case was “Goodfellas.” Get on that for a beach or subway read, something to bring along to a solo lunch at the diner, to read on an airplane headed somewhere for work.
This “Photo Booth” feature in The New Yorker, about the British photographer Mark Neville’s post-Brexit work in Brittany, France, is quite extraordinary.
Finally, it’s been more than a week and I can’t stop thinking about William Bryant Logan’s piece in our Sunday Review, “The Lessons of a Hideous Forest,” about wild growth at Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island. (Great photographs by Damon Winter.) Please read it and I’ll be back on Friday.
