Alternatively, you can cook without a recipe, as I did recently, riffing off instructions from the indispensable Woks of Life for pork riblets with 1-2-3-4-5 sauce. That’s a tablespoon of Shaoxing wine, two of low-sodium soy sauce, three of black vinegar, four of sugar and five of water. Brown the pork in a hot wok slicked with neutral oil, add a few coins of ginger, get some color on them and then add your five other ingredients. Cover the wok and allow everything to burble away for 20 or 25 minutes, then take the top off and reduce the sauce to a glaze, tossing the ribs often to coat.
That, some rice and a tiger vegetable salad? Weekend perfection.
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Now, it’s nothing to do with making granola or flipping omelets, but a friend gave me an old paperback copy of “Beautiful Swimmers,” William W. Warner’s 1976 book about blue crabs and the Chesapeake Bay watermen who trap them. I hadn’t read it since I was a kid. It’s about 10 times better than I remember, and I remember it fondly.
There’s a new Junot Díaz short story in The New Yorker, “The Ghosts of Gloria Lara.”
Man, does Jason Farago make me want to get to Paris immediately to see the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which he calls “a show of monumental dispersion” and “a pull-out-all-the-stops blockbuster where life passes into vapor.”
