Good morning. The rhubarb’s beginning to pop by the fence where it always grows, but it’s still a few weeks from its delicious adolescence. That’s OK. I know there are farmers who force it, and I’m happy to pay them for their labor. I’ve been dreaming of rhubarb pound cake (above) for months, astringency against buttery sweetness, a perfect taste of spring.
Featured Recipe
Rhubarb Pound Cake
So that’s on the docket for today, dessert to follow a seasonal feast of pasta Bolognese with lamb and peas and a shaved asparagus and radish salad. I hope you’ll join me.
As for the rest of the week. …
Monday
Some weeknights, I like to improvise in the kitchen, set aside detailed recipes and cook from a prompt instead. Take, for example, my vague instructions for bulgogi-style tofu, which you can easily make your own. Serve with rice, lettuce cups, kimchi and a dipping sauce of sesame oil and ground white pepper.
Tuesday
Zaynab Issa brought us a terrific new recipe for malai chicken, a warmly spiced and yogurt-marinated dinner that’s traditionally cooked in a tandoor or served as a curry. Here, though, everything’s prepared on a sheet pan in the oven, with crisp potatoes and tender onions alongside the browned chicken, and cream and lemon juice added at the end to create a lovely, tangy sauce.
Wednesday
On cool nights in this shoulder season, you can’t go wrong with Alexa Weibel’s recipe for creamy Swiss chard pasta with leeks, tarragon and lemon zest. It’s notionally a vegetarian recipe, but I like Lex’s suggestion to melt some chopped anchovy in butter to add to the panko that dresses the pasta at the end.
Thursday
Melissa Clark developed this recipe for creamy fish with mushrooms and bacon off a memory she had of a similar dish served by the chef Hugue Dufour when he was running M. Wells in Long Island City, Queens. It’s simple, hearty, home-style cooking, excellent served with sliced baguette for swiping through the sauce.
Friday
And then you can run out the week with Kay Chun’s excellent recipe for chicken katsu, Japanese comfort food to eat with shaved cabbage, rice and plenty of tonkatsu sauce. Make plenty of cutlets so you have leftovers for katsudon over the weekend.
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Now, it’s a far cry from anything to do with the preparation of yogurt or sourdough, but I liked Emily McCrary’s piece in the Oxford American about the James E. Foy Information Desk at Auburn University in Alabama. It’s an old-school service students provide there, a reminder of the pre-internet era when you could call the library to get an answer for whatever question happened to be on your mind: “What is cefuroxime prescribed for?” “What’s the average cost of an acre of land in Texas?” “What is watercress?” They’ve been at it since 1953.
I enjoyed Kelefa Sanneh on the country singer Megan Moroney, in The New Yorker. Classic K: “Almost all her songs are about love, although she sings mostly about coping with its absence, or its failure to be respectfully reciprocated by various dudes.”
In The New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner has a terrific review of the restaurant titan Keith McNally’s memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything.” Get on that. (Dwight points out in passing that one of McNally’s restaurants, Schiller’s Liquor Bar, served as the inspiration for an excellent novel by Richard Price, “Lush Life,” published in 2008 and also worth reading.)
Finally, the chef and actor Matty Matheson has a punk band now, Pig Pen. It played its first gig in Toronto recently (at Sneaky Dee’s!), and it’s like time travel to the early 1980s. See you in the mosh pit. I’ll be back next week.
