Good morning. The days are growing longer, and the joys of weekend life extend along with them. Long-simmered sauces and pot roasts are on the way out. It’s almost the time of the year when a Sunday supper can be held on a stoop, porch or sidewalk folding chair, everyone eating in the falling sun.
For that exercise, there’s no better recipe than Tejal Rao’s for fried chicken biscuits with hot honey butter (above), a meal to set on your lap and eat with your hands. You could head to the store for supplies right now, cook for a few hours and then take a long nap on the couch before everyone gathers out front or back for an al fresco meal. Dinner’s done. You made it already. Just unwrap your sandwiches and get to talking. That’s nice.
And if you’re preparing for the feast of Eid al-Fitr to mark the end of Ramadan, it’d be a fine time to think about lamb biryani and watermelon chaat. (We have loads more recipes here.)
Monday
If you’re looking for simplicity at the top of the week, this mushroom pasta stir-fry is the business. I hope you’ll give it a try.
Tuesday
This simple, comforting chicken katsu is a marvelous weeknight recipe to serve with shredded cabbage, tonkatsu sauce and more rice than you’ll need for the meal. Just refrigerate the leftover grains so that …
Wednesday
… you can make shrimp fried rice the following night! It’s a recipe that nods to the fried rice served at American hibachi restaurants, combining frozen shrimp and mixed vegetables in a fast and remarkably delicious fashion. Maybe it’s the mayo-ketchupy “yum yum sauce” drizzled at the end that brings the whole thing over the top? It might be!
Thursday
There’s something incredibly elegant about this asparagus, goat cheese and tarragon tart. To serve it on a weeknight is to intimate that you’re very serious about the business of home cooking. But the truth is, it’s a remarkably easy dish to prepare.
Friday
Then you can run out the week with this lovely Swiss chard risotto, streamlined, springlike and beautifully pink and green. The best part besides the succulent taste? Very little stirring!
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Now, it’s nothing to do with cabbage or cinnamon, but I’ve grown fond of “Mentions,” The Drift’s collection of elegant mini-reviews of culture products: books, long movies, albums, newspapers, a community fridge and the like.
Closer to home, but still not in the kitchen, check out Tom Lamont’s superb examination of a day in the life of the world’s vending machines, in The Guardian.
Here’s Tejal Rao in The New York Times Magazine, on mannequin food in Japan, with exquisite photography by Kyoko Hamada.
Finally, there’s a new poem by Jorie Graham in the London Review of Books, “Time Frame.” Consider that, and I’ll be back on Monday.
