As for the rest of the week. …
Monday
I love the nuance of Alexa Weibel’s lemony pea and spinach soup, with its grassy flavors of celery, leeks and vermouth that inch up to but never overpower the sweetness of the peas and spinach. Make sure to read the notes our subscribers have made on the recipe. There are ingredient swaps galore!
Wednesday
Employing a novel technique for crisping the tofu, Ali Slagle’s recipe for green curry glazed tofu is a top-notch weeknight dinner, one you’ll knock out in roughly the amount of time it takes to cook the rice you’ll eat it with. So good.
Thursday
Another excellent option from Ali: You cannot go wrong coating a chicken cutlet in sour cream and onion dip, breading it with panko and shallow-frying it to crisp perfection.
Friday
And then you can head into the weekend with Julia Reed’s recipe for shrimp and grits, which she picked up in 2002 in landlocked Sewanee, Tenn., to no ill effect. For what it’s worth, I make the grits with equal parts water and milk, and add a splash of cream and a bunch of freshly ground black pepper at the end. For the shrimp, I follow the instructions to the letter.
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Now, it’s a far cry from baking cookies or rendering duck fat, but there are some things in the world that you ought to be aware of and one of them is Teju Cole’s essay in The New York Times Magazine about the Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He sees the trouble in the paintings, inextricably linked to their beauty.
I enjoyed the baker Rick Easton’s dinner diary for Grub Street last week.
Here’s a short story by Madeline ffitch in Harper’s Magazine that you ought to read, “Seeing Through Maps.”
Finally, our Jon Pareles turned me on to Squid’s new track, “The Blades,” post-punk prog-rock that’d make an excellent accompaniment to your kitchen high jinks. Listen to that and I’ll be back on Friday.
