Good morning. A number of years ago, on a sunny afternoon in Melbourne, Australia, I ate a pork gyro, a species of gyro I had never encountered before. I’d grown up eating lamb gyros at Mr. Souvlaki on Montague Street in Brooklyn, but never pork ones. Maybe beef ones, too, occasionally. But mostly lamb: the meat shaved onto pita and then topped with salad, tzatziki and a red sauce of ketchup deeply cut with hot sauce. The pork version was a revelation. When I got home I made the dish again and again until the recipe was good enough to share.
Here comes another revelation: Lidey Heuck’s new recipe for chicken souvlaki (above), which uses yogurt in the marinade to make the chicken incredibly tender. No grill? No problem. You can roast the chicken to cook it through and then crisp it on the stovetop in a sauté pan slicked with neutral oil hot enough to be almost smoking.
Featured Recipe
Souvlaki
So that’s on the docket for Saturday dinner, with pita, tzatziki, that ketchup-y hot sauce and baked French fries on the side. Maybe olive-oil honey cookies for dessert?
For breakfast on Sunday, I’d like to go full diner style, with eggs over easy, Samin Nosrat’s awesome — and simple! — maple breakfast sausage and Naz Deravian’s new recipe for crisp breakfast potatoes, roasted gold in the oven. That’ll set me up nicely for a nap during the Giants-Commanders game at 1 p.m. in the East. Perhaps some jalapeño poppers during halftime, for lunch?
Of course you may prefer granola — I like this version studded with freeze-dried strawberries — followed by cucumber-ricotta sandwiches for lunch. I don’t judge.
But for dinner, I’m going with Ali Slagle’s latest: crispy rice with salmon and avocado, which pairs crisp blocks of seared sushi rice with creamy raw salmon and avocado. It’s a riff on a dish made by Los Angeles chef Katsuya Uechi, himself riffing on yaki onigiri. That would be a nice end to the weekend.
Still, so would a cauldron of Sunday gravy, to serve with pasta and a Lucali salad. So would a fantastically French roast chicken with tarragon and Cognac. And so would a mushroom and eggplant yassa, fragrant and fantastic over rice. Follow your bliss.
Thousands more recipes are waiting for you on New York Times Cooking, at least if you have a subscription. I get that might chafe, but subscriptions are important. They support our work and allow it to continue. So if you haven’t done so already, would you consider subscribing today? Thank you.
You should write for help if you find yourself hamstrung by our technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or you can write to me if you have questions of a more philosophical sort, or just want to complain. I’m at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter, I’m sorry to say. But I read each one I receive.
Now, it’s nothing to do with fonio or the price of skirt steak, but I had the good fortune to come across June Gervais’s novel “Jobs for Girls With Artistic Flair” recently, and the reading is delicious.
I love that my colleagues, energized by Taylor Swift’s new “Eras Tour” concert movie, have assembled a list of concert films you ought to watch afterward. “Summer of Soul”? Yes, please.
More fiction: “I Am Pizza Rat,” by Han Ong, in The New Yorker.
Finally, let’s close with a new track from boygenius, “Afraid of Heights.” “Not everybody gets the chance to live a life that isn’t dangerous,” Lucy Dacus sings. That’s something to think about while you’re cooking. I’ll see you on Sunday.
