Good morning. I’m done with feasting for a while. I’ve had my holiday turkeys and hams and meat pies and trifles, my stacks of New Year’s oysters, my showstopper project recipes, that cake you need to start a month in advance. I want intimate dinner party food, simple and delicious and elegant, something to enjoy with a few friends, not all of them.
Enter David Tanis. He has three terrific new recipes for just that sort of meal this weekend. Start with a light and seasonal citrus salad with radish and watercress — five ingredients and no cooking required! Follow it with a taste of British comfort food: cauliflower cheese (above), bubbly hot with a Cheddar-fueled white sauce. And then, for dessert, try this dead-simple pistachio-chocolate bark to nibble on at the table with a glass of dessert wine or a rare nighttime coffee, as everyone talks about the movies or the weather. It’s going to be a very interesting year.
Featured Recipe
Cauliflower Cheese
That said, I can’t help myself. Lisa Donovan’s new recipe for a pimento cheese pie calls out to me as well, combining her super-buttery pie dough with the chef Ashley Christensen’s recipe for pimento cheese to achieve a kind of snacking perfection that’ll pair well with Sunday’s wild-card N.F.L. games.
As for Naz Deravian’s recipe for old-school egg rolls? Those would work just as well. If I don’t go slab pie, I’d like to make those and eat them with mustard and a cold, cold beer, just as I used to do when an egg roll cost about the same as a slice of pizza and two of them made a fine accompaniment to sports on TV.
And I won’t sacrifice breakfast either: buttermilk pancakes, perhaps, or yeasted waffles, with oven bacon and velvety scrambled eggs. (After that, I can pass on lunch.)
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Now, it’s quite a distance from anything to do with fileting fish or making forcemeat, but I’ve been enjoying the Korean drama “Bloodhounds,” on Netflix, about two boxers teaming up with a bighearted moneylender to fight a ruthless band of loan sharks. (It’s complicated.)
Michael Connelly’s latest novel in the “Lincoln Lawyer” series is “Resurrection Walk.” Not bad!
Worth reading: Hanif Abdurraqib on Sleater-Kinney’s new album, “Little Rope,” in The New Yorker.
And finally, here’s “Untidy Creature,” off that very album. Listen to that nice and loud. I’ll see you on Sunday.
