Good morning. It’s Caucus Day in Iowa, and a chunk of our newsroom is hunkered down in Des Moines, getting ready to report what’s happening into the night and early-morning hours of Tuesday. I hope you’ll follow along on our home page, and participate in our efforts to understand the news of the day and night.
For dinner, you could put the fillings for these middle-school tacos onto a round of pizza dough and bake it, like that Iowa classic: a Happy Joe’s taco pizza. Or, if there is no way that you’re going to do that, ever, you could make Melissa Clark’s excellent new recipe for pasta with broccoli rabe and anchovies (above) instead, adding a fat dollop of ricotta to the pan at the end, to make the sauce creamy.
Or, way more ambitiously, you could start to put together David Tanis’s elegant menu for a dinner party for this coming weekend: an endive salad with egg and anchovy to start, followed by bollito misto with two sauces and a dessert crostata of pears and almond. It’ll leave you feeling elegant and metropolitan even if you’ve spent the day out on the street swapping out the brake pads on your car.
More new recipes to consider cooking tonight or in coming days: one-pan spicy meatballs with lentils and fennel from Ali Slagle; cheesy baked orzo with marinara sauce, from Lidey Heuck; and vegan red beans and rice that you could make in a slow cooker, or in a pressure cooker, from Sarah DiGregorio.
(Here’s how to make that dish with pork sausage, btw. And guess what: You could make it in a slow cooker. You could make it in a pressure cooker.)
It’s not precisely new, but I’ve been making versions of Yewande Komolafe’s baked tofu with peanut sauce and coconut-lime rice for weeks now, and I think it might make first-team weeknight all-stars for 2020. Give that a shot yourself.
Or, listen, when was the last time you made a weeknight griddled cheeseburger, served it with French fries out of an Ore-Ida bag, a squeeze of ketchup on the plate, some pickled jalapeños, a little mayonnaise, maybe a little miso in that mayonnaise, some chopped white onion, iceberg lettuce, a thin round of tomato? Oh, man. That’s food for politics coverage for sure.
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Now, will you see what you make of this Amanda Mull piece in The Atlantic, about millennials reaching peak domesticity as single people, and buying their Le Creusets and KitchenAids themselves, instead of receiving them as wedding gifts. Lots to unpack there.
It’s nothing to do with laminated dough or star-anise marinade, but I think you ought to read this Willy Staley jam in The Times, about the show “High Maintenance,” how it and other television comedies depict New York right now, and about the essential loneliness of the gentrifiers, alone together way out on the Brooklyn fringe.
Have you seen this Instagram feed that quotes the notes on our recipes? Check out this Twitter thread that assigns each note an astrological sign.
Finally, Wes Wilson, the ’60s artist who made psychedelic posters for Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and others, has died at 82. The Times has a great slide show of his work. Page through that, and I’ll see you on Wednesday.
