Good morning. I hate to be a bummer but daylight’s burning and the year’s half over and if this thing of ours were a rom-com, we’d be deep in Act II: rising action, higher stakes. Something’s gotta give! Before long, we’ll be buying the kids new Buster Browns and planning out school lunches, soccer practices, our approach of the boss for a raise.
Maybe that’s just me, though, dragged by the black dog into the scary woods? Here I’m worried about endings when really we haven’t even properly begun! I’ve yet to have a good summer tomato, for instance, much less a properly sweet ear of corn. I need many of both, against these dark thoughts.
And soon I’ll have them, sure as the season marches along. In the meantime, though, I’ll fight for happiness at the start of a new month, with mangonadas for miles, this awesome beet and cabbage salad that Angela Dimayuga and Danny Bowien came up with years ago at Mission Chinese, roasted asparagus, fish tacos, chilled pea soup with mint. That’ll cure what ails me.
Come to think of it, I can’t help but smile, thinking about the joy of eating a Konbi-style egg salad sandwich (above) on a summer’s eve. Likewise a platter of grilled green beans with garlic and herbs. Not to mention bread and butter pickles, so pleasing alongside a quickly grilled rack of baby backs.
Happy Canada Day, while we’re at it, Fête du Canada! (Hey, I’m feeling great now.) It’s been 152 years since Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined the Dominion. Mix up a Caesar when you get home, a kind of salad cocktail, then follow it with fish cakes, or butter tarts for dessert. Let freedom ring from Vancouver and the Yukon to Labrador and Quebec. Here’s Sarah McLachlan singing “O Canada” at the Heritage Classic hockey game in 2014.
Or go look around NYT Cooking for more inspiration. (You need a subscription to do so. Subscriptions keep the lights on here.) You might find yourself pan-roasting a chicken.
You can visit us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, if you’d like to see even more, and you can always reach out to us if you find yourself in a jam with a recipe or the technology: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you. (If you want to thunder in rage, take it directly to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com.)
Now, it’s a long-haul flight from anything to do with chicken or waffles, but if you’re not on social media, like, constantly, you may have missed Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London who is on the hustings to become the next prime minister of Britain, explaining to a reporter what he does to relax. He builds model buses.
I once commended to you Terrance Hayes’s “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.” Here is one of them, in The New Yorker.
