Good morning. These are the days of miracle and wonder, Paul Simon sings through the device on the counter. This is the long-distance call. It is the highest of summer where I am, torpor is afoot, and all I want to do is bubble some birria de res (above) on the stove in advance of a dinner of tacos and Micheladas.
Featured Recipe
Birria de Res
You may make your Micheladas simply, as Rebekah Peppler does, with just lime and salt. I do not. I deploy a healthy splash of Clamato juice, rim my glass with Tajín and add a few splashes of hot sauce and Worcestershire. And I like my Micheladas cold — the beer stored in the freezer so that it’s flecked with the beginnings of ice, then served over actual ice so that it smokes a little in the humidity while the glass around it sweats.
That drink makes me feel like Travis McGee aboard the Busted Flush, slip F-18 at the Bahia Mar marina in Fort Lauderdale. The tacos make me feel content, as if all the possibilities in the world are in front of me and ready for the taking, a turnaround jump shot.
That and a peach cobbler for dessert? This will be a weekend for the record books.
I’ll rise early Saturday to make a lunchtime version of Tejal Rao’s recipe for fried chicken biscuits with hot honey butter. Tejal did that one day a few years ago, wrapping the sandwiches in wax paper and bringing them to the office as if she were taking them to a picnic. I ate mine in a cubicle; her sandwich took me to Sheep Meadow in Central Park, to a stretch of beach at Jacob Riis Park, to the peak of Mount Monadnock. I’ll take today’s to Great Kills on Staten Island, and eat it while watching ospreys soar.
Tomato tonnato for dinner, with spicy corn on the cob with miso butter and chives? Yes. Then pancakes on Sunday morning, with maple syrup and a scattering of blueberries, thick-cut bacon and strong, milky tea. A lunchtime sandwich to follow? Sure: deli turkey on a roll, with Swiss cheese, coleslaw and a Russian dressing of mayonnaise cut with ketchup, sour cream, relish and hot sauce.
And then, after a nap, I’ll make Sunday supper: shrimp and grits in keeping with the season, alongside another Michelada and the realization that summer, for all its troubles, is the greatest time of the year.
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Now, it’s a considerable distance from anything to do with turmeric or veal, but I’ve been enjoying “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” on Max.
Sarah Lyall, writing in The New York Times Book Review, has me excited for Daniel Kraus’s novel “Whalefall.”
There is lots to talk about in this Patrick Raden Keefe profile of the art dealer Larry Gagosian, in The New Yorker.
Finally, Jon Pareles, in The Times, got me onto Mitski’s latest, “Bug Like an Angel.” Listen to that while you’re cooking. I’ll see you on Sunday.
