Good morning. René Magritte made a painting of this day in 1956, a Surrealist depiction of a crescent moon hanging in a tree, rather than in the sky behind it. It’s a quiet, powerful work. The moon disrupts our sense of depth and leaves us unsettled, as if in a house of mirrors, as if a citizen in the world of 2019. I’d like to make kalpudding to eat while I look at it, adorn the meat with gold leaf in place of moonlight.
I won’t do that last part. But kalpudding’s awesome.
Of course it’s also Mexican Independence Day, a marker of the insurgency that got underway on this day in 1810, and resolved itself 11 years later with the Treaty of Córdoba. As Rick A. Martinez reported for The Times this week, it’s said that the leader of the Mexican Army at the time, Agustín de Iturbide, marched into Puebla in victory and was fed by nuns from the convent of Santa Monica: stuffed poblanos with walnut sauce and pomegranate seeds (above), a dish of green, white and red, to honor the Mexican flag. If I can’t do that tonight (kalpudding!), I’ll certainly try later, certainly by the weekend.
Some don’t eat meat on Mondays. Perhaps they’ll get to eat vegan mapo tofu tonight. It’s a recipe I’ve been messing around with a lot. I like it with firm tofu, for instance, instead of soft. You can use gochujang in place of the bean paste. I often do. I sometimes don’t grind the Sichuan pepper but crush it and then bloom the spice in the heat of the oil right at the start. I’ve added ground pork, in place of the mushrooms, a Monday heresy. And I’ve definitely stretched the sauce, because I love it so much mixed into rice, after the tofu’s gone.
Would you prefer tuna salad tonight, a fancy version from Scarlett Lindeman in Mexico City, which Tejal Rao picked up on a reporting trip?
Or chicken schnitzel, from Melissa Clark? Or three-cup chicken? Or chicken and apricot and masala?
You might, if there’s good looking white-fleshed fish at the market on the way home, try this excellent new recipe from Lidey Heuck, for roasted fish with jammy cherry tomatoes. That’s a fine feast on a Monday night.
Though of course you could make tofu makhani instead!
You see how it goes. Thousands and thousands more recipes to cook tonight await your consideration. Just visit us at NYT Cooking to see them. (You need a subscription, of course. We work hard to make that worth your scratch.) Visit us, as well, on Instagram and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. And please write if you run into any issues along the way, either with your cooking or our journalism. We monitor cookingcare@nytimes.com as if it administered dopamine. We will get back to you.
Now, it’s nothing to do with cooking at all, but this week’s reading is absolutely Lara Prescott’s novel, “The Secrets We Kept.”
If you somehow missed it last week, here is The Strategist’s ranking of the 100 best notebooks, which is as much fun to debate as any list of 100 best novels. (Moleskine Classic at #19? That is a HOT TAKE.)
Not for nothing, in fact quite the opposite: I’m learning a lot from Wirecutter Money.
Finally, Michael Chabon on United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses” in The New York Review of Books? It reads like a movie treatment, and you should spend some time after reading the piece casting the film. See you on Wednesday.
