Good morning. Tuna continue to crash around the New York Bight eating baitfish, and fishermen I know continue to drop off gifts of belly and loin. A recipe I’ve been making a lot, which you could make with yellowfin or salmon from the store, is this East Coast take on Hawaiian poke (above).
I took the advice of some subscribers who wrote notes on the recipe and added cubed, just-ripe avocado, sliced jalapeño, toasted sesame seeds and a spray of lime juice when I served it over seasoned sushi rice. This was outstanding counsel.
Tuna poke is catching up with tomato sandwiches and grilled corn as my favorite late-summer meal. Corn salad with tomatoes, feta and mint is a contender, too, as is this one-pot orzo with tomatoes, corn and zucchini.
Other dishes I’m thrilling to these days: pan-seared ranch chicken with its crisp skin and incredibly moist meat; baked tofu with peanut sauce and coconut-lime rice; and this incredible recipe for spicy and tingly beef that Tejal Rao adapted from a dish Jason Wang serves at his Xi’an Famous Foods in New York. Tejal suggests that the sauce would be terrific served with a big pile of sautéed mushrooms, and she’s absolutely correct. (Tear some oyster mushrooms into bite-size pieces and sear them in an oil-slicked cast-iron pan until deep golden brown and crisp, then combine with the sauce and reduce over medium heat.)
Now, it’s nothing to do with the best jarred artichoke hearts or the price of skirt steak, but if you missed Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram’s Times investigation into “The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score,” you ought to read it right now. Scary!
The Michelin Guide is coming to Toronto. Mathew Silver of Toronto Life spoke to Andrew Weir, the executive vice president of Destination Toronto, the city’s tourism marketing organization, about how that came to be. Sausage made, and not inexpensively: “We paid initially for the Michelin inspectors to come into the market for months at a time, and that has evolved into a broader marketing partnership, which needed to happen for the guide to become a reality.”
I think you’ll like Hua Hsu’s “Personal History,” in The New Yorker, on his father and Kurt Cobain.
Finally, here’s Jess Smith’s poem, “Valentine,” winner of the Hayden’s Ferry Review inaugural poetry contest. I’ll be back on Friday.
