Good morning. There’s all kinds of excitement in the Food section of The Times this week, from Tejal Rao’s exciting visit to the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, for beef Wellington and legerdemain, to Priya Krishna’s accounting of the rise of immigrant and refugee cuisine in Lancaster, Pa., the heart of Amish Country.
And I loved Pete Wells’s accounting of every single delicious thing to eat at Mercado Little Spain, José Andrés’s warren of restaurants, bars, counters and shops under the High Line, in Hudson Yards in Manhattan. That’s news New Yorkers can use.
But perhaps you came here for recipes. In this weather, which depresses my evening appetite and leaves me craving big flavors in the morning, I’ve been thinking a lot about Julia Moskin’s recipe for breakfast salad (above), which she adapted from one served at the Brooklyn restaurant Carthage Must Be Destroyed. Maybe you could set yourself up to eat that tomorrow morning, and see how you fare. Hot take: Greens at dawn! This is the next avocado toast.
Then, come evening, you can keep things simple, make one of this collection of really easy summer pastas that you can make in 30 minutes or less.
Or you might try sesame-miso chicken salad. You could cook salmon with lemon-herb marinade. Absolutely, sometime soon, you should assemble a dinner with tomato and basil, summer’s hottest couple.
And I love Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest, a recipe for charred tomatoes with feta, that is as adaptable as any I’ve seen. You could serve it hot as a chunky sauce for pasta, rice or couscous. You could use it as a room-temperature condiment with grilled chicken. Or you can refrigerate it for use in sandwiches, or as a second-day salad, so great.
There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook in coming days waiting for you on NYT Cooking. (Yes, you need a subscription to access them. We’ve talked about this!) But it’s important to remember that you don’t always need recipes to make beautiful food. Sometimes you just need a prompt.
Like, for instance: How about a peanut butter smoothie? One of my kids asked that the other day and talked about what might be in it, and I listened and then I jammed: a couple of bananas, a big scoop of peanut butter, a couple big glugs of milk, a couple drops of maple syrup, a whole bunch of ice. Blitz that in your blender or food processor and enjoy. It’s like a morning frappé, slightly savory, really good.
You can find further inspiration on our Facebook and Instagram pages, and on Twitter and YouTube to boot. (Watch my man with the huge watch make fish tacos!) And if all else fails you can write to us at cookingcare@nytimes.com, our service desk, or to me at foodeditor@nytimes.com.
Now, it’s some distance from pizza and kung pao smoked brisket, but if you missed Robert McFadden’s Times obituary of Robert Morgenthau, the “courtly Knickerbocker patrician who waged war on crime for more than four decades as the chief federal prosecutor for Southern New York State and as Manhattan’s longest-serving district attorney” on Monday, please read it now. He was a towering figure in my house, growing up. (Bonus track: Here’s a PBS interview with him from 1997, so you can hear him speak, a Manhattan accent, perhaps one of the last.)
I’m not sure what rabbit hole led me to this tab, but I loved this old Sports Illustrated yarn about the marijuana-smuggling drug kingpin and racecar driver Randy Lanier, by L. Jon Wertheim. Then I learned there’s a new podcast about the guy, “Smoked,” from The Miami Herald and McClatchy Studios. Will tune in.
Speaking of, we’ve got a new TV show, “Diagnosis,” on Netflix.
Also from The Times, here’s Ellen Barry on the Dutch scouting tradition known as a “dropping,” in which groups of little kids are left in a forest and expected to find their way back to a camping site. This takes a long time, and it’s pretty cool.
Finally, I made my way back to Season 1 of “The Sopranos” recently. They really are going to be studying that show in 200 years, as literature. See you on Friday.
