Good morning. “Dear Winter,” the sign in front of a local business read, “I’m breaking up with you.”
Me, too. I love cold, snow, thick ice, quartered oak roaring in the fireplace. I love sea smoke on the bay and the crunch of frozen leaves beneath my feet in the forest. But I don’t love those things enough to want winter to go on forever. I stare out the window at the bare trees out back, the dirt below them where once grasses waved, and the gray seeps in, a seasonal depression, and all I want to do is push south toward turquoise water, a high sun, sweat on my upper lip.
It’s time for a strawberry smoothie (above). Frozen strawberries, a really ripe banana, whole milk, a drop of honey, all whizzed together in the blender for breakfast on a Sunday morning — there’s no more reliable antidote to the winter blues than that. Think pink. The equinox is coming.
Featured Recipe
Strawberry Smoothie
Fortified by berries, I’ll turn my thoughts toward dinner, another seasonal dodge: clam fritters and mayo-ketchup sauce (what Eric Kim calls fry sauce), with plenty of limes. Eat that to the tune of “Independent Bahamas,” with mango slaw and cold beer, and you’ll see how easy it is to trick the mind, to bring sunlight and humidity into a cold March evening.
With Sunday taken care of, you can turn to the rest of the week. …
Monday
My friend Pableaux Johnson died at the end of January, too soon. Like a lot of his friends (and he had a lot of friends), I’ve taken to making his recipe for skillet cornbread on Monday nights, to accompany the red beans and rice he used to serve weekly at his home in New Orleans and across the country on his Red Beans Road Show. Join us.
Wednesday
What I like best about Melissa Clark’s recipe for a lemony carrot and cauliflower soup is how she adds a little miso paste and crushed coriander seed to the broth and then fresh lemon juice and chopped cilantro at the end. It takes a regular-degular bowl of comfort to terrific new heights.
Thursday
I like patty melts as much as the next guy, perhaps a little bit more than the next guy. But this recipe I put together for portobello patty melts provides sandwiches that are arguably better than the beefy original, and they’re a breeze to put together on a weeknight, too.
There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this week waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Go take a gander and see what you find. (You’ll need a subscription, of course. Subscriptions are the fuel in our stoves. If you haven’t already, would you consider subscribing today? Thanks.)
Please write for help if you run into issues with your account, and someone will get back to you: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Or write to me if you want to register a complaint or say something kind about my colleagues: hellosam@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read each one I get.
Now, you’d have to tie yourself in a complicated knot to have it be anything to do with kitchen antics or dining-table joy, but you should read Clay Risen’s obituary for the novelist John Casey, who died on Feb. 22 at 86. His “Spartina,” from 1989, is required reading around here.
Also in the fiction aisle, here’s a new Colm Tóibín short story in The New Yorker, “Five Bridges.”
True crime from Luc Rinaldi in Toronto Life: “Murder in the Blue Mountains.” People can be horrible.
Finally, here’s AJR to play us off: “Dear Winter,” of course. Listen loud and I’ll be back next week.
