Good morning. It’s Birds vs. Chiefs this evening and great swaths of the nation will be watching the game, taking in the hits and the ads, looking for Taylor Swift in the crowd, wondering what Kendrick Lamar will do at halftime, wondering if Kansas City can three-peat a National Championship against its rivals from Philadelphia.
This’ll be true even of those who don’t generally follow the N.F.L. The Super Bowl’s an American holiday. Close to 124 million people watched last year. And man, do they chow down when they do. Take it with a grain of salt (maybe a dollop of blue cheese dressing, too), but the National Chicken Council estimates that we’ll eat 1.47 billion chicken wings during tonight’s game.
I eat enough wings already that I’m going to pass on them tonight. Instead, I’ll put out this terrific jalapeño-corn dip (above) from Melissa Knific with a mess of chips, and follow it up with ham and cheese sliders and frosted sugar cookies for dessert. Winners all.
Featured Recipe
Jalapeño-Corn Dip
And then, with Sunday taken care of, I can turn to the rest of the week:
Monday
Yasmin Khan’s recipe for roasted cauliflower soup, adapted by Mayukh Sen, is a gently spiced Palestinian stew, redolent with cumin and coriander, that’s thick, velvety and, importantly, easy to make. Don’t stint on the spices, nor on the almonds scattered over the soup when it’s done.
Tuesday
I often make like a New Englander when it comes to baked cod, coating my fillets in mayonnaise and mustard, then covering them with breadcrumbs. But Lidey Heuck’s recipe for baked cod opens up new horizons. Olive oil, lemon, garlic and a healthy scattering of chopped parsley and minced chives combine to make a fragrant, bright, sunshiney sauce that complements the fish beautifully.
Wednesday
My old friend Ian Fisher spent years perfecting his recipe for spaghetti carbonara, going so far as to make his own guanciale to flavor it. It’s an excellent recipe. Omit the garlic if garlic in carbonara makes you mad. That’s fine!
Thursday
I’m generally suspicious of turkey burgers because they’re so often dry and crumbly. But Andy Baraghani’s new recipe for spicy turkey burgers brings mayonnaise into the patty to keep everything juicy and uses cayenne pepper and smoked paprika to give it heat. And there’s an iceberg slaw he puts on top of the burger — that may be the star of the show.
If you’d like other options, go click yourself into New York Times Cooking and see what you find. Yes, you need a subscription to do that. Subscriptions are the fuel in our stoves. If you haven’t done so already, would you consider subscribing today? Thank you.
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Now, it’s a considerable distance from anything to do with eggs and cream, but I’ve jumped into John Lawton’s series of Inspector Troy novels, starting with the first, “Black Out,” from 1995. It puts us in wartime London, 1944, and opens with the discovery of a severed arm. Let’s go!
Staying with the London theme, I’d sure like to get to the Warburg Institute there to see this exhibition tracing the history of tarot cards from Renaissance Europe to the present day.
Jesse Coburn, writing for Curbed, follows the rise of Ou Zhou, New York’s moped king. Coburn sent a bunch of Ou’s vehicles and batteries out for testing. The results were not good. It’s a scary read.
Finally, today is the birthday of the Irish playwright and poet Brendan Behan, who died in 1964 at the age of 41. Here’s his “The Coming of Spring,” light verse for deep winter. I’ll be back next week.
