Good morning. Gabrielle Hamilton has a beautiful recipe in The Times this week, for cold candied oranges (above). It’s accompanied by an essay that’s a glittery, perfect jewel. I think it might get you to make the dish even on a weeknight, just so you can have it the next night after dinner, a perfect taste of adult paradox, “juicy but cooked,” Gabrielle writes, “candied but fresh, bitter but sweet — that’s all there is to say and certainly all that is needed.” Secure a channel knife on the way home, some good seedless oranges, a box of sugar. Then: go to!
For dinner as the oranges murmur in their bubbling pot of sugar water? This amazing recipe for vegan cacio e pepe, which office wags have lately been calling cashew e pepe, for the nut butter that makes the “cheese.”
Not for you, that kind of alchemy? I get it. Here’s a chicken and rice soup with ginger and turmeric. There’s a nasty cold going around, knocking out voices and filling noses with sand. Among other attributes, this fellow will help knock it out.
Or, maybe you could make this recipe for coconut creamed kale. What I’d do, to accompany it, is toss a whole bunch of shrimp into a pan of foaming butter, let them go pink and fragrant, then hit them with some flaky salt and a few grinds of black pepper. Done!
Here’s a neat little magic trick, one that brings the pleasures of a street fair into a big bowl on your dining room table: sausage and peppers pasta with broccoli. (Me, I’d use broccoli rabe.)
Alternatively, how’s about vegetarian tortilla soup? Or quick-roasted chicken with tarragon? I love this recipe for eggs poached in red wine. If you have some demi-glace in the fridge (and you oughta!), add a spoonful to the cooking liquid. (I think the chef Daniel Rose does that with his exquisite version of the dish at Le Coucou in New York.)
You could go retro, make middle-school tacos. You could make a tofu scramble. You could make cannellini-bean pasta with beurre blanc.
There are thousands and thousands more recipes waiting for you on NYT Cooking. To cut to the quick: You need a subscription to access them. We’ve talked about that, I think. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. I thank you for yours.
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Now, it’s nothing to do with chicken fingers and it’s dark as a closed closet in an empty house, but you should absolutely read this shivery Mary South short story in The New Yorker, “You Will Never Be Forgotten.”
Hop into the wayback machine, why don’t you, and read this secret oral history of Bennington College in the 1980s, which ran in Esquire last year.
In Maine, some sharpies are gearing up for the elver-fishing lottery, which will allow a little more than 4,000 fishermen access to a fishery that enjoys at-the-dock prices of something like $2,000 a pound.
Finally, here are the Arctic Monkeys opening the 2012 London Olympics, “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor.” Let that energy take you into this week, and I’ll be back on Wednesday.
