Go for the gold: The Most Incredible Cauliflower

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Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Rebecca Jurkevich.

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

The Most Incredible Cauliflower

Sam Sifton

Good morning. I love Melissa Clark’s new recipe for roasted cauliflower with pancetta, olives and crisp Parmesan (above), a deeply flavorful dish that could become a weeknight go-to for you these next couple of months. I love, too, Yasmin Fahr’s recipe for spicy baked butternut squash pasta with spinach, same deal.

But I also know that Wednesdays can be tough for cooks stuck in the horse latitudes of the week: becalmed, frustrated, unable to imagine passage forward. If that’s you, that’s fine, it’s normal. Just order a pizza and pile a salad on top of it. It’s a classic no-recipe recipe for injecting ease of preparation into the dinner hour, with a payoff that’s a little eccentric and a lot delicious.

I enjoy a lemony-bright herb salad on my pizza (about which: sausage and black olives, this time?), but you can go the other direction: chopped romaine and a healthy drizzle of ranch dressing. Or, really, use whatever salad you like. The important thing is the interplay of textures and flavors and temperatures. Salad pizza! That’ll get you back on track.

And here’s something to make when that happens: pumpkin-ginger oat scones, from Genevieve Ko, who recently joined NYT Cooking as a senior editor. She came to us from The Los Angeles Times. Please make her welcome.

More: baked chicken with potatoes, cherry tomatoes and herbs; pan-roasted fish fillets with herb butter; orecchiette with brussels sprouts and bratwurst.

You could make this awesome banana granola with cinnamon, nutmeg and walnuts. You could grill huli huli chicken. You could choose one of these fall pastas and take it to town.

There are thousands and thousands more recipes waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go explore them! Save the recipes you like. Rate the ones you’ve made. And you can leave notes on them, either to remind yourself of a hack or substitution or to tell your fellow subscribers about them. (Yes, it’s true: You do need to be a subscriber to do all that. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. If you haven’t done so already, I hope you will think about subscribing today.)

And we will be here to help if anything goes wrong along the way, either with your cooking or our site and apps. Just send a note to us at cookingcare@nytimes.com and someone will get back to you, I promise.

Now, here’s a fascinating dispatch from the road to Thanksgiving 2020: Kim Severson on turkey farming during a pandemic, in The Times. The math of it is fascinating.

It’s nothing to do with poults or cranberries, but I’ve got some new fiction for you to read: “Transit,” by Khaddafina Mbabazi, in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

And I’ve really been enjoying the Indian crime drama “Paatal Lok,” on Amazon Prime, in particular for the acting of Jaideep Ahlawat. You’ll see what I mean.

Finally, here’s my old colleague Stephanie Clifford in Marker, writing about MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife and one of the world’s richest women, and how she is rewriting the philanthropy playbook. Enjoy that, too, and I’ll be back on Friday.