Good morning. Rabbit rabbit. Ligaya Mishan took to the pages of The New York Times Magazine this weekend to praise the inventive, improvisatory cooking of her husband. The couple are cooks as they are musicians — they both trained as pianists. But where Ligaya plays notes? Her husband composes them.
And now we can play them, too: a recipe for his vaguely Southeast Asian fish with citrus and chiles (above). It’s a sauce that, Ligaya wrote, “is denser than a vinaigrette but still loose and the orange-red of a young sunset, with dark flecks of Timur pepper. It’s summer-light yet earthy, lending a generous, almost floral warmth. I don’t entirely understand what I’m eating, but I want more.”
Me, too. Summer-light yet earthy is exactly my mood right now.
In that vein, I could see myself buying a lobster or two this week, to make Maine coast lobster rolls. It won’t be nearly as expensive as buying a prepared lobster roll along the Maine coast this year.
More young-sunset cooking: This new recipe for skillet chicken with orange and turmeric. Orange and turmeric are common ingredients in Moroccan cooking that combine beautifully. They make for some powerfully good chicken breasts. That, too, could be your dinner tonight.
Now, it’s many miles from anything to do with silken tofu or Concord grapes, but Tom Robbins is in The New Yorker with a profile of Christopher Colombo, son of a mob boss, and it’s a remarkable read. (With aces photographs from Sinna Nasseri.)
A new favorite cookbook, from Prince Edward Island in Canada: “My PEI Cabbage Cookbook,” by Ann Thurlow.
There are many reasons to love Dwight Garner’s book reviews for The Times, but one of them is that after reading his accounting of Robert Lowell’s “Memoirs,” I feel I don’t have to read the book!
Finally, here’s a new one from the British band Sorry, “Let the Lights On.” Listen to that nice and loud. See you soon.
