Good morning. The punishing heat continues where I stay. While I’m turning on the stove occasionally, my meals are mostly running no-cook and salad-adjacent: say, marinated celery salad with chickpeas and Parmesan or, in the same vein, marinated zucchini with farro, chickpeas and Parmesan. Who wants to labor over a burner when you could eat delicious cooling food instead?
I might pick up a heat-lamp bird at the supermarket for a chicken and herb salad with nuoc cham (above), or make this ice-cold schav to eat outside on the stoop. Maybe cold spicy kimchi noodles? Or avocado toast?
Good tomatoes are coming in, fat, crimson beauties out of Pennsylvania. I like those shingled onto thick slices of toasted sourdough that have been drizzled with a hint of olive oil and rubbed with raw garlic, then sprinkled with flaky salt. But a classic caprese salad would be a nice use of them, too. And you can always assemble a tomato sandwich, with mayonnaise spread on your toast, as the saying goes, “wall to wall.” That’s a luscious summertime meal.
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Now, it’s nothing to do with canned tuna or dry pasta, but I think you’ll enjoy Evan Osnos on “The Haves and the Have-Yachts,” in The New Yorker. So. Many. Good. Sentences. “If you’ve just put half a billion dollars into a boat, you may have qualms about the truism that material things bring less happiness than experiences do. But this, too, can be finessed.”
Here’s Tejal Rao in The Times with an appraisal of the life and legacy of Diana Kennedy, a towering authority on Mexican cooking, who died on Sunday at 99. (William Grimes wrote her obituary.)
Do read Lex Pryor in The Ringer, on the retirement of Allyson Felix, the most decorated woman in American track and field. (On Saturday night she returned to help the American team advance to the finals in the women’s 4×400 relay at the world championships in Eugene, Ore.)
