Good morning. I’ve been making big kale salads recently, with dried cranberries, lardons of bacon, dabs of Brie, cubes of Honeycrisp apple and sourdough croutons, all slicked in mustardy vinaigrette. Sometimes, to gild the lily, I’ll fry a chicken-thigh schnitzel to drape over the top. This is a statement meal, and a great way to get in a last round of brassicas before switching to spring’s lighter lettuces. As the novelist Brandon Taylor might tweet, it’s giving.
Speaking of assertive greens (or in this case, purples): I’d very much like to cook David Tanis’s menu for an early spring dinner. He pairs bitter radicchio with an anchovy dressing (above) to start, followed by tofu Milanese with lemon, capers and broccolini and a kumquat panna cotta for dessert.
So there’s that to cook this weekend, for sure. This could also be a good time for a kitchen project, while the weather is still just brisk enough to keep the indoors appealing. Maybe I’ll bake biscuits and simmer some milk into yogurt. I could see making focaccia for Sunday sandwiches. I might even hazard something along the lines of Yotam Ottolenghi’s devil’s food cake with hazelnut praline.
I’m intrigued, as well, by Ligaya Mishan’s new recipe for vegan sopa de maní, a Bolivian peanut soup, adapted from one that Patrick Oropeza makes at his restaurant Bolivian Llama Party, in Queens.
And I might ramp up some practice rounds for the coming Passover and Easter holidays, or herald a Ramadan break-fast. So, say, chopped liver on matzo, some braised leeks with Parmesan, a carrot maqluba?
The idea is simply to escape into process, into the joy of combining ingredients to make something that wasn’t there before, to give my family and friends something to eat that will bring smiles to faces that maybe weren’t very smiley before the meal.
Thousands and thousands more recipes you might cook this weekend are waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. You do need a subscription to read them. I hope you will subscribe today — it’s the last day to get a special rate for the complete Times experience, which includes Cooking, during our All Access sale.
More housekeeping: We are at cookingcare@nytimes.com should you find yourself in trouble with our technology. Write to us and someone will get back to you. And I’m at foodeditor@nytimes.com if you’d like to lodge a complaint or offer a compliment. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read every one I get.
Now it’s nothing to do with strawberries and lamb, but do check out Sam Jefferson’s thrilling 2017 rich-people adventure yarn, “Gordon Bennett and the First Yacht Race Across the Atlantic.” How gilded was the Gilded Age!
In The Times, you’ll want to read Tiffany May’s obituary of Yang Bing-yi, the restaurateur whose Din Tai Fung restaurant chain brought soup dumplings to the world. He died last week at 96.
A new C.J. Box novel in the Joe Pickett series, “Storm Watch,” allows us once again to debate whether the novels are fundamentally right-wing, left-wing or caught in the curious Western Venn diagram of being both.
Finally, my colleague Lindsay Zoladz has brought a new pop music newsletter to The Times, The Amplifier, a recommendation machine that works as a kind of antidote to the algorithm. I hope you’ll sign up for it and enjoy the serendipity of discovering music through her ears. See you on Sunday!
