Good morning. The cherry blossoms were pinking the side streets on Staten Island the other morning as I drove the family down from Joe and Pat’s pizzeria to the beach at Great Kills, for a walk out to Crooke’s Point.
It was one of those days that feel like a vacation, a small adventure, a taste of the world beyond. We walked on the hard sand above the tide line, and I felt as I sometimes do walking through the Garden District in New Orleans when the bougainvillea scents the air. Everything was possibility.
So maybe a vegan dinner, then? Millie Peartree has a terrific new recipe for blackened cauliflower, spiced hard and cooked on a preheated sheet pan, that would pair beautifully with Alexa Weibel’s super-creamy vegan mac and cheese (above). I think you could make that tonight.
As for the rest of the week. …
Monday
Ali Slagle has a new recipe for salmon with asparagus and nori rice that’s also shaping up as a weeknight winner, since you can cook the asparagus and ginger-coated salmon in the same pan. Cooking the rice with dried seasoned seaweed gives it a fine oceanic flavor, excellent alongside the fish. Going forward, I think we’ll be cooking a lot of nori rice.
Tuesday
I love Melissa Clark’s recipe for pepperoni pasta with lemon and garlic, though I hold back on some of the crisped-up pepperoni to add at the end, for texture. One subscriber adds a dollop of mascarpone. I’d go with ricotta myself.
Wednesday
Chag Pesach sameach! Passover begins today, though you need not be observant to enjoy Joan Nathan’s chicken with artichokes and lemon, a tagine that goes well with couscous — or not, depending on your Passover traditions.
Friday
And then you can end the week with Eric Kim’s new recipe for sticky ginger-and-honey-baked chicken. Shellac the drumsticks with a simple marinade of ground ginger, soy and honey, then bake them over root vegetables for a delicious one-pan meal. It is the best kind of comfort food.
Many thousands more recipes to cook this week are waiting for you at New York Times Cooking. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you need a subscription to read them. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. I hope, if you haven’t already, that you will subscribe today. Thanks very much.
Drop us a line if you run into trouble with our technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or write to me if you want to shout about something, or just say hello. I’m at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter sent. But I read them all.
Now, it’s a far cry from anything to do with lobster or sweetbreads, but my mention last week of Tugzilla prompted a reader to write to remind me of Farley Mowat’s great nonfiction account of a seagoing salvage tug that operated in the Canadian Maritimes during the 1930s and ’40s, “The Grey Seas Under.” That book is worth a trip to the library.
Longreads put me on to a lovely essay by John Lewis-Stempel in Britain’s Country Life magazine, “A Day in the Life of an Oak Tree, From Mistle Thrush in the Morning to Mice at Midnight.” Nice.
Should Plum Island, just to the east of Orient Point on Long Island in New York, be named a national monument? The East Hampton Star weighed in.
Finally, it is the singer and songwriter Emmylou Harris’s 76th birthday. Here she is in 1995, singing “Beneath Still Waters,” at Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Play that while you’re cooking. I’ll be back on Friday.
