Good morning. I was down in Howard Beach eating a slice from New Park Pizza as the sun bore down hard on Cross Bay Boulevard, and that is what I wish you could be doing today whether you read these words in Los Angeles or Brisbane, Paris or London, either one of the Portlands or on the Upper West Side, from which you’re not going to travel to Queens on a Monday for anything, come on. It got me to thinking that you ought to make some pizza yourself in this, probably the last week of indoor pizza cooking until at least October.
It needn’t be tonight. Tonight, you should make David Tanis’s new recipe for spaghetti with zucchini, parsley pesto and bottarga (above), even if you don’t have bottarga on hand. (If you do, I salute you.) Afterward you can mix up some pizza dough that’ll rest in the refrigerator until you’re ready to bake it tomorrow or the night after or the night after that.
Another new recipe to try: Melissa Clark’s grilled flank steak with Worcestershire butter and charred tomatoes. Worcestershire butter is going to be big this summer, just you watch.
Also a must-prepare, this peppery recipe Michael Ruhlman brought back from the Midwest, for Indiana fried chicken.
And, holy cats, how about these pan-seared shrimp with blistered cucumbers, corn and tomato salad with Thai dressing from Colu Henry?
We have many, many more recipes waiting for you on NYT Cooking. For instance: One-pan pork chops with feta, snap peas and mint. Also: curried lamb; vegan mapo tofu; sweet potato fries. And: chicken drumsticks with orzo, dill and feta. Take out a subscription and collect them all, in the process helping to keep us employed and discovering — for you — many more delicious things to eat.
Come visit us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, where we’ll show you life backstage. And ask for help with your accounts or with your cooking if you need it: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.
Now, let’s stray afield of the recipe box for a moment. What’s better, piragua or Italian ice?
Today is the birthday of the English television personality, author and chef Clarissa Dickson Wright, of “Two Fat Ladies” fame, who died in 2014. She would have been 72. She was awesome.
I read this fine Gabe Bullard piece in The Bitter Southerner about the eating of squirrel and possum, and discovered a breed of dog I didn’t know, the mountain feist, a squirrel hunter of some renown.
I’m not going to ink a pair of tumbling dice onto my neck over it, but I enjoyed Wes Enzinna’s Letter of Recommendation in The Times Magazine, for stick-and-poke tattoos.
Finally, and maybe this is just for New Yorkers but I think it’d be cool wherever you live, check out the New York City Street Tree Map, which allows you to zoom in on specific trees to determine their species and size. That cool elm tree near where I walk my dog? Actually a Japanese zelkova, resistant to Dutch elm disease and all kinds of beetles! See what trees grow near you or in the neighborhood you’d move to, if you could ever imagine living here. See you on Wednesday.
