Good morning. “That old September feeling,” Wallace Stegner wrote in “Angle of Repose,” his 1971 novel about the myth of the American West, “…another fall, another turned page: There was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.”
Which is to say, it’s time to get busy, time to make granola for the week’s breakfasts to come, to lay in a turkey breast to make cold cuts for the lunches ahead, to draw up a shopping list for the market that will yield a week of dinners ahead. I’ll help with the recipes, and together we’ll make this the best new beginning yet.
Because all is forgiven from your behavior, January to August: all those delivery orders you called in too often in the dark days of winter and into the spring; all those terrible greasy pizzas you picked up near the train station on the nights you played Overwatch in your neighbor’s basement; all those takeout orders from Lucy’s Football Café that left you on your back, every time.
You spent the summer getting your feet wet, maybe, with tomato and watermelon salad and speedy fish chowder, weeknight grilled ribs, the occasional banana muesli smoothie. You know you can cook.
But now it’s time to get serious, and cook all the time. Tonight, for instance, you could make Melissa Clark’s new recipe for chicken with figs and seckel pears (above), a practice run for Rosh Hashana or a weekly special so long as there are pears at the market, and figs.
Then, on Monday night, take a run at Ali Slagle’s new recipe for crisp gnocchi with brussels sprouts, arugula and brown butter.
On Tuesday, there’s no need to get fancy. Make sloppy Joes and then settle down with Ann Cleeves’s new novel, “The Long Call,” which introduces a new detective, Matthew Venn.
Wednesday night, keep it simple again: Sue Li has a new recipe for sautéed eggplant with herbs and chiles that would go just great with a big pile of rice and an early bedtime.
Have fun on Thursday: Priya Krishna and her mom have a great new recipe for Indian-ish nachos that come together in about a half-hour and are wildly delicious. (Watch Priya make the dish in our Instagram story.)
Then, if you have time afterward, knock out Jerrelle Guy’s new recipe for zucchini muffins with a cinnamon crunch topping]. You take those to work or school on Friday, to the place where you volunteer, to the hot-stove league down at the village store, and you’ll be hailed as a hero, I promise.
And finally, to head into the weekend in style: Kay Chun’s new recipe for sheet-pan chicken with crisp potatoes, scallions and capers. Look at that. You cooked every night this week!
If those particular recipes don’t appeal, many thousands more are waiting for your perusal on NYT Cooking. You’ll encounter some friction trying to access them if you don’t have a subscription, of course. Indeed, you’ll hit a kind of wall. It is easy to scale it, though: All you need to do is support our work, and we’ll do everything in our power to help you become a better cook. Please do!
You can find further inspiration on our Instagram and Twitter pages, and on Facebook and YouTube. And if you run into any trouble along the way, either in the kitchen or online, don’t panic. You can write us for help. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.
Now, it’s nothing to do with turmeric or cold grapes, but camper-van daydreamers like me might want to get lost in the promise of Transporter Werks, down in Dunn, N.C.
Here’s Michael Slenske with Judy Chicago, whose show at Jeffrey Deitch’s gallery in Los Angeles has been a big hit, in Los Angeles magazine.
Broadway audiences in New York are gearing up for Jeremy O. Harris’s new work, “Slave Play.” Michael Paulson has a curtain-raiser in The Times.
Finally, I kind of loved this Maclean’s report from this year’s string-quartet competition at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, in rural Alberta, Canada. It led me to this video of the Viano String Quartet playing Beethoven’s No. 9 in C Major. Cook like they play! See you tomorrow.
