Good morning. I took a walk through the flower district of Manhattan the other day, West 28th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. The sidewalk was impossibly crowded with people and plants and cuttings. A seller picked up a pot of grass by its leaves and the pot dropped to the ground, revealing its roots. His colleague pointed this out. “Lost his shoes,” he said.
The air was fragrant — peonies, gardenias, frangipani — and I realized that I hadn’t smelled those scents in months. The past few months have been a perfume of roasting meats, snuffed-out candles, Earl Grey tea. It’s time to change that. Whatever you cook today, whatever you cook this week, add some flowers to your shopping list. Crowd your countertops with vases. Inhale deeply with your nose. Force the season.
For dinner: Melissa Clark’s green goddess roasted chicken (above), which pairs the salty, acidic, herb-laden dressing with a perfectly burnished bird. I’ll add salt and vinegar roast potatoes and some raw vegetables to dip in that sauce.
Featured Recipe
Green Goddess Roasted Chicken
And with Sunday sorted, we can turn to the rest of the week. …
Monday
Decades from now folks will still be complimenting Eric Kim on his recipe for gochujang buttered noodles. It’s a genuine hit, a simple, delicious pantry recipe as suitable for single servings as for families. “I would follow Eric Kim to the ends of the earth,” one subscriber wrote in a comment.
Tuesday
Andy Baraghani’s new recipe for a spicy shrimp puttanesca takes the traditional Neapolitan tomato sauce with olives, garlic, capers and anchovies and adds to it the briny-sweet punch of shrimp. The sauce has a base of tomato paste, which thickens it so that it really clings, and a final pat of butter delivers a glossy sheen. All dials are turned up to 11.
Thursday
Vivian Chan-Tam brought us this fantastic recipe for Mongolian beef, a fast stir-fry of sliced velveted beef in a fiery-sweet sesame-soy sauce that did not, as it happens, originate in Mongolia. It’s Taiwanese, based on a recipe for Beijing-style barbecue. All food is political.
Friday
And then you can run out the week with Zaynab Issa’s recipe for chicken jalfrezi, with chicken thighs coated in a thick and fiery tomato curry, excellent with basmati rice and naan. It’ll take you to Brick Lane, London, back in the old days.
There are many thousands more recipes to cook this week waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Go click around the app and see what you discover. (You need a subscription to do that, naturally. Subscriptions make this whole operation possible. If you haven’t done so already, would you consider subscribing today? Thanks!)
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Now, it’s some considerable distance from anything to do with the preparation of victuals, but Tas Tobey, for The New York Times Book Review, turned me on to Alex Dimitrov’s new book of poems, “Ecstasy.” (Here’s some of Dimitrov’s work online.)
Luke Winkie has a great dispatch from Las Vegas in Slate, about a gambler who broadcasts his every bet on YouTube, which has garnered him an enormous following. Why do we watch? Meet Vegas Matt, “The Biggest Loser.”
In Macleans, I found these dark and illuminating photographs of St. John, New Brunswick, taken by Chris Donovan. They’re part of his book, “The Cloud Factory,” which documents life in one of Canada’s most industrialized cities.
Finally, here’s Prince with a reminder: “Sometimes It Snows In April.” Enjoy that while you’re cooking and I’ll be back next week.
