Good morning. We celebrate Martin Luther King’s Birthday today, a national day of service, a day to practice love, as the minister said, not as an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism, a way to ensure the life of our civilization.
Some will make pecan pie (above) in his honor, because some say that was one of King’s favorite foods. I’d prefer to read his work and consider how in this coming year we all might do better by those around us. Start with his sermon “The Death of Evil Upon the Seashore,” from 1956, if you want to join me.
It’s a federal holiday, so maybe you’re not at work. We’ve put together a sprawling selection of recipes appropriate to the third day of a long weekend. Me, I’ll point you toward that Instant Pot machine you maybe got over the holidays, alert you to this incredible guide we wrote to introduce you to the device’s best use, and encourage you to use it to make pressure cooker garlicky Cuban pork. (Or, hey, use a slow cooker to make chili. That’s the beauty of a day off. You can do a lot quickly. Or you can do a lot slowly. It’s all good.)
Some excellent new recipes have joined our ranks. Alexa Weibel, for instance, brought us one for the preparation of albóndigas, the Mexican meatball soup. Lex learned it from the chef Wesley Avila, the chef at Guerrilla Tacos in Los Angeles. Avila learned it from his mom, who in turn learned it from her grandmother. It’s as solid as recipes come.
Ali Slagle’s got a neat recipe, too, for a spanakopita-style baked pasta, with lots and lots of greens. Or give Colu Henry’s instructions for chicken soup with hominy and poblano a shot. And I’m definitely making Lex’s cheesy cornbread muffins with hot honey butter sometime real soon. Maybe, like, this afternoon. They’d be so good with fried chicken.
There are an astonishing number of other recipes to cook today or in coming ones awaiting you on NYT Cooking. You do of course need a subscription to access them. But in return we’ll give you a recipe box in which to organize them, and tools that allow you to share them and leave notes on them, for yourself or the betterment of others — a mechanism, we believe, that makes your subscription more valuable every time you come to our site and apps. Please do sign up, if you haven’t already. Or tell a friend!
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And if something goes sideways with your cooking or our technology trips you up? Just write cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.
Now, it’s a few football fields away from the subject of cooking, but I liked this Evan Ratliff yarn in The California Sunday Magazine, about a notorious Melbourne defense lawyer and her secret life as a police informant.
