Good morning. The ospreys are returning to their winter-ravaged nests near my home waters this week, after long passage from South America, a sure sign of spring. The striped bass will show up behind them, looking for food in the shallows up in the back bays and estuaries. I’ll rig a fly rod and go look for them, under the birds’ watchful glare.
It’s early yet, though. The water’s in the low 40s and the trees on the shore are bare. The fishing’s imaginary right now, at least for me. I’ll still think about it all weekend in the kitchen, though, as I cook.
On the menu for Saturday night: this lovely BBQ pepper shrimp (above) that Korsha Wilson adapted from a recipe of Tim McNulty’s, used at his family’s Lobster Pot restaurant in Provincetown, out at the very end of Cape Cod. It’s a variation on the New Orleans classic, made a little more luxurious with a nutty beurre blanc blended into the Worcestershire and herby hits of rosemary and thyme.
Featured Recipe
BBQ Pepper Shrimp
I’ll serve that dish with a baguette warmed through in the oven, ahead of a green salad. (I’d like to accompany both with a lengthy discussion of crab flies and their use in the early part of the fishing season, but there will be no takers at my table for that.) All-purpose biscuits would be a nice match as well, though you may wish to bake those on Sunday morning instead, to slather with butter and marmalade and eat with scrambled eggs.
For lunch, I’m thinking Rhode Island clam chowder, clear as the tide running out of the Charlestown Breachway there, saline and sweet, with red potatoes, celery, onion and many, many top-neck clams. The N.C.A.A. women’s hockey national championship game gets underway at 4 p.m. in Minneapolis (the semis are tonight, with Wisconsin battling Minnesota, and Cornell taking on Ohio State) and I don’t want to be hungry when I watch.
And then, for dinner, another Southern-inspired dish: smothered chicken, to serve with collard greens and grits. Farideh Sadeghin’s recipe calls for dredging the chicken in flour seasoned with garlic and onion powders, paprika and cayenne. I use Lawry’s Seasoned Salt instead, because the very first smothered chicken I ever ate was flavored with it, and sometimes I enjoy the taste of nostalgia. Give it a try sometime.
If none of those ideas appeal, there are thousands more recipes to consider waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Go take a look and see what piques your interest, then cook what you’ve found.
If you run into problems with your account, please write for help: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (You do have a subscription, right? You need one. If you don’t, would you consider signing up today?) Or you can write to me if you want to complain about something, or pay a compliment to my colleagues: hellosam@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read each one I get.
Now, it’s nothing to do with preserved lemons or potted shrimp, but a reader put me on to “Everyone Knows But You,” a crime novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas E. Ricks, set in coastal Maine. I blew through it.
Helen Shaw has a good interview with the actress Sarah Snook in The New Yorker, on the occasion of Snook’s performance of all 26 characters in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” on Broadway.
You’ll want to read our Michael Kimmelman on the renovation of the Frick, which reopens in New York next month, and Holland Cotter’s review of its contents, also in The Times.
Finally, Chappell Roan’s gone country with “The Giver.” “Ain’t got antlers on my walls/But I sure know mating calls.” Listen to that while you’re cooking your shrimp. I’ll see you on Sunday.
