Go for the gold: What to Cook Right Now

August 4, 2021

David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

What to Cook Right Now

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. David Tanis brought us a beautiful vegetarian dinner (above), and I think it would make a great meal for you this week: a melon, cucumber and cherry tomato salad leading into a kormalike main course of summer vegetables in spiced yogurt sauce and a blackberry crisp with cardamom custard sauce for dessert.

Capitalizing on the bounty of the farmer's market, it's exactly the sort of menu that celebrates what David calls this magic moment of summer.

Me, I'm still recovering from a restaurant meal of double-cooked pork belly in black bean sauce, some soup dumplings and a giant smashed cucumber salad. I can't say I didn't love that lunch unreservedly, but it showed pretty clearly how different my eating has become over the course of the pandemic: less focused on huge amounts of protein; less aggressively fatty and salty; no less delicious. Corn risotto for dinner tonight, please, and I'll follow with Tanis's three-course number in a couple of days.

Other recipes to consider as August gets underway include this chicken and herb salad with nuoc cham that you could make with a rotisserie bird, a pile of soft herbs, some cabbage, cucumber and bell peppers, and a drizzle of the sweet-sour-salty Vietnamese dressing; and this terrific tomato salad with chickpeas and feta, a satisfying main course with a spicy, crunchy topping of roasted, salted nuts and seeds.

Take a look at this smoky and spicy roasted salmon as well. It would be a fine thing to eat in advance of a strawberry-lemon loaf cake for dessert. And maybe crispy spiced chickpeas with peppers and tomatoes at some point? A cucumber agua fresca with mint and ginger? A lemon-spice visiting cake? Definitely this grilled corn with chile butter.

There are many thousands more recipes to cook this week waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Yes, you need a subscription to access them. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. Please, if you haven't done so already, I hope you will subscribe today.

You can find additional inspiration — absolutely free of charge — on Instagram and YouTube, where Vaughn Vreeland recently documented the 27 meals he cooked for himself over the course of a week.

And we'll be standing by in case you get jammed up in the kitchen or with our technology. Just drop us a line: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back you. (You can also write to me, if you like: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it's nothing to do with fried apples or confectioners' sugar, but I did like reading this accounting of Central Intelligence Agency employees canoeing to work.

Here's E. Alex Jung in New York, on the writer Anthony Veasna So, who died before his first book came out and made him a star.

Wow am I late to it, but "Atlanta," now on Hulu, is just terrific.

Finally, here's Penelope Green's wonderful Times obituary for Chuck E. Weiss, the Los Angeles musician and club owner who palled around with Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones, and was the inspiration for Jones's hit song in 1979, "Chuck E.'s in Love."

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