Good morning. Two days into the season, and it’s past time to open up the summer house of the mind, commence the annual rereading of Colson Whitehead’s “Sag Harbor,” get ready to hit the grill in shorts and flip-flops on the final day of the weekend, make some spiedies (above) even though you didn’t think to start marinating them last night.
That’s fine. A mere afternoon in the acid bath of vinegar, lemon juice, oil and herbs — or a couple of hours, as long as you’ve got — will do your pork or chicken right, and after you’ve cooked the meat, you can slide it in pieces into a hero roll brushed with garlic butter and dotted with hot sauce and experience a version of nirvana.
On the side, the grilled broccoli with apricot puttanesca we brought back one time from the kitchen of the chef Nick Anderer at his Marta restaurant in New York.
Dessert? I think this simple strawberry tart will do.
And then we’ll be off to the week again with all its requirements and stumbles and meetings and delays. So! I like the idea of Melissa Clark’s recipe for spicy rice noodles with peanuts, cucumber and radishes on Monday night, meatless and filled with flavor.
For Tuesday, Julia Moskin’s recipe for pan-roasted fish fillets with herb butter, which is stunningly easy to make and pairs very well with a plain roasted potato or a pile of rice or a mound of mixed salad greens and herbs.
By Wednesday, you’ll be exhausted even if you follow my advice, and wondering if maybe you ought to order some takeout, take a seat on the couch, watch “The Weekly” on Hulu, go to bed. Do so! But don’t order the takeout. Make this grilled cheese sandwich instead, and dip it in ketchup as you eat, sitting there on the couch, considering this amazing reporting and storytelling Times journalists have brought to the screen.
On Thursday night, you could make cumin-lime shrimp with ginger, eat them with warm tortillas and some sliced avocado, and consider that life is very good indeed.
And then, to round out the week and gear you up for a weekend of summertime happiness, ricotta-stuffed shells with pesto, a recipe that tastes like sunshine.
Thousands and thousands more recipes you could cook this week are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Just take out a subscription so that you can see them all, and so I can keep doing this job, which is the only thing I really know how to do.
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Now, please read my colleague Julie Bosman on her home-state tradition of dairy breakfasts in Wisconsin. It’s an excellent piece of reporting.
It’s nothing to do with frittatas and allspice, but Longreads turned me on to this accounting of shameful cremation practices in Colorado, by Elena Saavedra Buckley in High Country News, and I think you might read it this afternoon.
This is cool. Archival 1960s footage of Bread and Puppet Theater’s “A Man Says Goodbye to His Mother.”
Make like the rest of us and read Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble” so you can talk about it on the beach, at the store, the cocktail party, in the car, on line at the farmers’ market.
Finally, here’s Max Ng, the chef at Momofuku Ssam Bar, cooking his grandmother’s recipe for king crab noodles for Munchies, and it’s mouthwatering. See you tomorrow.
