Good morning. Florence Fabricant delivered a beautiful new recipe for fettuccine with lobster and zucchini (above) this week, and it would be great to make it this evening because there are few acts more summery than cooking lobster on a weeknight.
But I’ve been messing around with these smoker tubes lately, and it’s like I’m in summer camp for outdoor cooking, and it’s all I want to do, all the time, weeknights included.
A smoker tube? It’s an inexpensive perforated stainless-steel cylinder into which you pack wood pellets, then set them afire, blow out the flame and allow the pellets to smolder within their casing on the side of a covered grill. The smoke continues for hours and hours, and it supercharges the process of smoke-roasting chicken in a charcoal grill. (It would take too long for a weeknight, but a smoker tube is also probably your best hope for success if you ever want to make pulled pork in a gas grill).
Smoker tubes are also fantastic for cold-smoking: putting the smoldering pellets into a cold grill and bathing ingredients in smoke, rather than actually lighting the coals or burner and applying heat to whatever you’re cooking.
So, for instance, say you put a couple hours of smoke on a bowl of neutral oil of the sort you’d use for stir-frying? That makes for a really, really good platter of orange beef.
Do the same thing to honey? You can stir a little bit of the smoky-sweet into whipped cream, to serve with cherry pie or a plate of good cheeses.
Speaking of: Smoked Cheddar’s pretty great, and smoked Gouda’s even better. Smoked mozzarella for a tricky caprese? Yes, please.
Which is great and all except maybe you don’t have a smoker tube yet. Nor a lobster. You need something to cook tonight, right now, and you look to me to provide the suggestion.
For you, then: Alison Roman’s ricotta dumplings with buttered peas and asparagus. That will change the color of your mood ring.
Thousands more recipes to cook tonight await you on NYT Cooking, albeit on the far side of a paywall that I hope encourages you to buy a subscription. If it only enrages you, you can yell at me, if you like: foodeditor@nytimes.com.
You can look for us on Facebook, too, as well as on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. I hope you do. We’re experimenting on those platforms, and having a great deal of fun. (You follow Vaughn Vreeland, yes? And Kiera Wright-Ruiz?)
And you can bring us questions about your cooking or our technology, simply by writing cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.
Now, you know the good life isn’t simply chicken and waffles. We like to read and listen and look and think as well, if only to fill the silences at our dinner tables. Like, look, I love Peter Orner’s writing. But it’s as much a joy to read Dwight Garner’s writing about Peter Orner’s writing, in The Times.
Here’re the Breeders playing the Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” live in 2013. Oh, wow.
I was very late to it, but Lauren Collins on Emmanuel Macron in The New Yorker is also remarkable, mostly for Macron’s decision to conduct his interviews with Collins in English, and how uncanny valley that turns his politics.
Finally, the chef Wolfgang Puck turns 70 today. Let’s end on one of his classic recipes, for pizza with smoked salmon and caviar. If you’ve got dough proofing in the refrigerator right now, go to! I’ll be back on Wednesday.
