Good morning. I was in Maine earlier this week, talking food journalism with Ruth Reichl at the Summer Institute of the College of the Atlantic on Mount Desert Island, and if talking with Ruth was a dream — in person! Not on a screen! — it was also exhilarating to be out of my bedroom office, taking in the landscape of beautiful places far from home. Plus, the food was sublime: corn salad and lamb chops one night from the Peggy Rockefeller Farms in Bar Harbor; a stuffed lobster roll from Beal’s in Southwest Harbor the following day; an ace banh mi from Saigon Sandwich House in Lowell, Mass., while on the road.
That lobster roll in particular was something I think we could all bring into our lives, at least if you can lay your hands on the sea bugs and don’t mind steaming them: a lot of shelled meat tossed lightly in butter and folded into a toasted, buttered hot dog bun. (Try that with crab if you can’t get the lobster, or with fresh shrimp just barely cooked through.) It’s a luxurious taste of summer at its simplest. Our Jason Epstein has a slightly more involved recipe (above), if you want a little celery and mayonnaise in there. (Some corn on the cob to go with it? That’s fine.)
Oh, I get it. Lobster’s expensive. So’s a ribeye steak. So is wild salmon and saffron and chickens that range free on organic feed. But for the moment there’s a lot of lobster available, at least in the Eastern United States, and if you plan your week right with frugality on other days to offset the splurge, a dinner of lobster can be a lovely way to celebrate the now. (Here are 15 other recipes for them.)
So lobster rolls tonight? That’s decided? Hope so. If I haven’t convinced you, here’s an inexpensive and awesome dinner of savory oatmeal with greens and yogurt.
On Monday, you might shift into this asparagus, goat cheese and tarragon tart, or these chile-oil noodles with cilantro.
And for Tuesday night, a tofu scramble, versatile and easily made.
Chicken under a brick for Wednesday evening? It’s one of the great weeknight feeds. (I actually put a plate over the chicken and my brick on top of that. It leads to a kind of stovetop steam-roasting situation that results in fantastic skin.) It’s very good with rice, with egg noodles, with bread and a simple green salad.
On Thursday, I like the idea of these sesame salmon bowls. (“My partner said it’s the best thing I’ve ever cooked,†one of our subscribers wrote in a note below the recipe.)
And on Friday, you can run out the week with pasta with garlicky anchovies and broccoli rabe.
There are many thousands more recipes to cook this week waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. You do need a subscription to access them. We’ve talked about that a lot. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. So if you don’t have one yet, I hope that you will subscribe today. (Follow us on YouTube and Instagram for free. And you can find our stories on Twitter.)
