Good morning. Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, is celebrated on Sunday. Technically a Hindu celebration of the triumph of good over evil, it is has become something of a cultural event in America, as Priya Krishna reported in The Times this week. “It’s a symbolic holiday that unites us as a diaspora,” Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democrat of Illinois, told her.
Of course we have some recipes: for Diwali main dishes; for starters and side dishes; and for plenty of desserts, including this remarkable shrikhand (above), a creamy strained yogurt number from western India that Tejal Rao learned to make from her grandmother in Nairobi.
Take a spin through our collections, and see if you can’t make a meal there to come before the shrikhand: some lalla mussa dal, a creamy lentil stew Priya picked up from the Indian celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor, say, along with the naan I learned from Meera Sodha (who learned it from her aunt Harsha!) and a dollop of raita with cucumber and raita.
Looking elsewhere, I like this roast chicken with maple butter and rosemary from Colu Henry, autumnal and wise. I bet it’d go great with this recipe for polenta and goat cheese that I used to make for dinner parties when the children were small, to serve with maple-glazed pork chops, apples, chopped pecans and candied ginger.
You ready for the first pot roast of the season? (My pal Margaux Laskey’s experimenting with one that combines the flavors of cranberry sauce and French onion soup!) How about a cheesy white-bean tomato bake? Or some bean and cheese enchiladas, no meat?
I’d love to make this winter squash and wild mushroom curry myself, a David Tanis jam adapted from Madhur Jaffrey. “Out of this world,” one of our subscribers wrote in a note below the recipe.
And I’d like to fire up the oven as well, for baking treats against the nip in the New York air: say a simple crusty bread to accompany dinner, and apple cider whoopie pies for dessert afterward.
There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this weekend on NYT Cooking. I hope you have a subscription so that you can access them, save them, organize them, leave notes on them, send yourself grocery lists from them and, now (at last!) cook with them on an Android app.
You’ll find us as well on Facebook, where we’ve discovered an energetic community of home cooks and subscribers, and on Instagram, where the stories spool on. Here we are on YouTube, where among other things you can learn to make jollof rice with Yewande Komolafe. And, yes, we’re on Twitter.
If you run into issues with any of this, with your cooking or our technology, please write. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. We’re in the service industry as much as the journalism one. We will get back to you.
Now, see what you think about Brett Martin’s list of the new classic American restaurants, in GQ: These are places too old to be “new,” and too new to be institutions, the magazine says. Quibbling with it is half the fun.
It has nothing to do with food, but Harper’s has an essay out by Doug Henwood, “To Serve Is to Rule: Why We Miss the WASPs.” I expect there’ll be more than quibbling, there.
There’s a new Michael Connelly out, “The Night Fire,” with Harry Bosch and the Los Angeles police detective Renée Ballard at it again. That’s a fine weekend read.
Finally, Halloween’s coming up, if you want to make candy apples, or caramel apples, in advance of the night. See you on Sunday.
