Go for the gold: Your New Favorite Soup

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Christopher Simpson for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

Monday, February 1, 2021

Your New Favorite Soup

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Melissa Clark has a terrific new recipe in The Times this week, for a creamy potato-Cheddar soup with quick-pickled jalapeños (above). The acidic zing of the pickled peppers is a surprise and a delight against the velvet sheen of potato and cheese, and I think if you make it tonight you may well find yourself thinking: Oh, wow, a new favorite soup.

Straying from the newspaper, here’s a serious question: When was the last time you had a proper tuna melt? That recipe is awesome, and could lead to a fine lunch tomorrow. With some spicy sesame noodles with chicken and peanuts for dinner?

This week’s shaping up nicely. I think I’m going to make these caramelized plantains with beans, scallions and lemon on Wednesday, with roasted chicken thighs. And I’d love to knock out this recipe for moo shu mushrooms on Thursday night. Chicken puttanesca, maybe, for Friday? Or sausages and cabbage? That last dish would go well with this deliciously simple crusty bread.

There are thousands more recipes like that — easy, flavorful, exciting, new — waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go browse among them and see what you discover. (I love this collection of nearly 50 recipes that you can make in one pot or one pan, “Because the Dishwasher Is You.”) Save the recipes you’re interested in making and, when you’ve made them, rate them. You can leave notes on them, too, if you figure out a hack or ingredient substitution that you’d like to remember or share.

And, if you haven’t done so already, please consider subscribing to NYT Cooking. Subscriptions support our work here. They allow it to continue. Thanks so much.

We are standing by to help, should anything go awry in your cooking or on our site and apps. Just drop us a line at cookingcare@nytimes.com and someone will get back to you, I promise.

Now, it’s nothing to do with stuffed haddock or mango sorbet, but Longreads alerted me to this excellent account of a terrible accident on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Louise Farr in Alta. It’s heartbreaking.

It’s Harry Styles’s birthday. He’s 27. Here he is singing “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” with Stevie Nicks in 2019.

I think you’ll like this excerpt from “2034,” a novel of the next world war by Elliot Ackerman and Adm. James Stavridis, in Wired.

Finally, I found your cooking soundtrack for this week. It’s Hailu Mergia and Dahlak Band, “Anchin Kfu Ayinkash.” Let me know what you think: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I’ll be back on Wednesday.