Good morning. This is my last newsletter for a while. I’m heading off the grid with my family to read and fish and gather berries and cook over wood fires, and I won’t write a word beyond the lists I keep of birds and trees and gear I need from town. You’ll hear from Julia Moskin tomorrow and through the week, then from Melissa Clark, and I’ll be back on the grind after Labor Day. I won’t miss the deadlines. But I’ll miss you a lot.
Here’s what to cook this week. For dinner this evening I like the looks of Melissa Clark’s new recipe for pork noodle salad with lime and herbs (above).
Or if you’re like the Chivers clan up in Rhode Island and there’s always some kid coming up the drive with a basket of quahogs, you could make David Tanis’s new recipe for clams in a spicy broth, with garlicky croutons, instead.
But either way, take a look at Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest for dessert, a warm fig and chocolate sponge cake. Yes, please.
There are many thousands more recipes to cook this week waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Yes, you need a subscription to access them, save them, share them, leave notes on them, rate them and use them again and again and again. We think it’s good value. I hope you agree.
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Now, maybe you’d like to hear me crack wise with my friend and former colleague Charles Duhigg, who hosts the “How To!” podcast for Slate? I went on his show the other day to help a love-seeking millennial dude cook a decent meal for a date.
Everyone has bugbears, and one of mine is carbon dioxide emissions from school buses, which generally are sent out via exhaust pipes parallel to the ground around the height of a child’s face. So I thought this was a pretty cool story in Popular Mechanics, about how a couple of M.I.T. students wrote an algorithm that directed school buses in Boston and cut 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a day.
Finally, please spend a lot of time today and in the days to come with “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine’s hugely ambitious, dark and important attempt to reframe our country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, when enslaved Africans were first sold to colonists and American slavery began.
See you in a couple of weeks.