Good morning. One of the many pleasures of working from the office after so much time away is rediscovering the restaurants I used to haunt at lunch time. My old friends! It’s largely been true, save for my return to the place where I liked to get dry-fried cumin lamb of fragrant excellence and remarkable, fiery complexity. It’s a limp, pallid, salty mess now. For this I put on dress shoes and took the subway?
I’ve got some feelers out for another spot. But in the meantime, I’m going to make it at home, using this recipe for crispy lamb with cumin, scallions and red chiles (above) that my colleague Julia Moskin adapted from the one Weiliang Chen used in his kitchen at the now-closed Northeast Taste in Flushing, Queens. (Melissa Clark has a streamlined version.)
I hope you’ll join me, even if lamb’s not your jam. Hetty McKinnon developed a recipe for cumin tofu that’s a vegan riff on a signature dish at Xi’an Famous Foods, the chef Jason Wang’s restaurant chain in New York. “Loved, loved, loved this recipe,” one subscriber wrote beneath it.
If you run into problems signing up, or using the site, please write for assistance: cookingcare@nytimes.com. You can also write to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I’m as helpful with accounts and technology as a turtle on a fence post. But I know some folks, and I read every letter sent.
Now, it’s a long day’s drive from anything to do with mung beans or cabbage, but I loved Dwight Garner’s review, in The Times, of the bookseller Marius Kociejowski’s memoir: “A Factotum in the Book Trade.”
I’m late to it, but you should read Amanda Fortini, in T Magazine, on the legacy of Black Mountain College.
Read this overdue obituary in The Times for Lottie Brunn, an amazing juggler who died in 2008 at age 82.
Finally, here’s Maren Morris’s latest, “Circles Around This Town,” a country music song about writing country music songs. Listen to that while you cook. I’ll be back on Wednesday.
