Good morning. Chili season gets underway in my house after the first day I am well and truly chilled on my daily bike ride north along the harbor, wind whistling out of the west as if to knock me over. That sure wasn’t yesterday, not in New York!
But as Mr. Martin wrote, “Winter is coming.” Sometimes I like a classic chili con carne to warm me up afterward, and always this firehouse chili gumbo.
Lately, though, I’ve been thrilling to Pierre Franey’s turkey chili (above), which I make with ground turkey and, freestyling, a bunch of cubed turkey thighs that I think add a welcome textural contrast to the stew. (Chili is endlessly adaptable to your tastes and ingredients, as detailed in my guide to making the dish.)
Featured Recipe
Turkey Chili
But you do you! We have enough chili recipes. Black bean chili with mushrooms, maybe? Alligator chili? Farro and bean chili? I love this white bean and lamb chili unreservedly.
Whichever, it’s a chili Sunday, and I’ll load mine up with sour cream, Cheddar and plenty of Fritos. Here’s hoping you join me.
And with that dinner taken care of, we can turn to the rest of the week.
Monday
The other day, my pal Big Mike found a huge load of chicken-of-the-woods mushrooms while he was out walking a trail, and I’ll use the portion he gave me to make Kay Chun’s new recipe for a vegan mushroom galbi with peppers and scallions. A mix of chopped creminis, shiitakes and sliced portobello caps will bring you equal joy.
Tuesday
Halloween! Make Lidey Heuck’s easy peanut butter fudge for the family, hand out candy to the stranger kids on the stoop, then order delivery pizza for dinner. This is perfectly acceptable behavior.
Wednesday
I like Vivian Chan-Tam’s new recipe for sesame chicken for how crunchy the batter gets while it fries and how sturdily it holds up against the sweet-savory sauce. Add some blanched broccoli and serve over steamed rice.
Thursday
One of the great joys in life is an evening trip to the fishmonger to see what’s available in advance of making my no-recipe recipe for a speedy fish chowder. Since I don’t specify what kind of fish or shellfish to use in it, you can make the dish entirely your own. Cod, porgy, barramundi, halibut, clams — cook what you find!
Friday
And then you can head into the weekend with a vat of miyar taushe, a Nigerian pumpkin and lamb stew that Ligaya Mishan adapted from a recipe by the food memoirist Yemisi Aribisala. Swallows on the side, please.
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Now, it’s many miles from anything to do with roast chicken or pan-fried tofu, but if you can’t make it to New York to see the Barkley L. Hendricks show at the Frick Collection, you can certainly spend some time with the artist’s portraits on the museum’s website. Note the dimensions. These paintings are large.
Stacy Schiff is in The New York Review of Books with an essay about Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” that has the best opening sentence of anything I’ve read this week: “Early on a wet spring morning in 1952, Arthur Miller maneuvered his green Studebaker into Elia Kazan’s Connecticut driveway.”
I enjoyed reading Zadie Smith’s latest novel, “The Fraud.” You may enjoy listening to Smith read “The Fraud” even more.
Finally, here’s Panda Bear and Sonic Boom with “Whirlpool Dub,” music to stew in. Enjoy and I’ll be back next week.
