Good morning. I love an Easter morning that’s a little cold but sunny, the air crisp around the daffodils in the park as cherry blossoms flit in the gutters and clouds move without anxiety against the bluebird sky. There’s a promise to that weather, with maybe a feast for lunch in the offing, and a long walk afterward.
So here’s to your ham or your lamb, if you’re celebrating the holiday, to your asparagus tart, your hot cross buns, your pizza rustica. Here’s to spring tofu soup as well, good for anyone, anywhere, and to this lovely fattoush.
You might make Einat Admony’s easy baklava, too, or Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook’s five-minute hummus. You should absolutely make these jammy deviled eggs (above).
The business of hard-boiling the eggs, scooping the yolks, mashing them together and piping the result back into the whites (as with this recipe for classic deviled eggs) is not for Ali Slagle. Instead she steams the eggs until they’re just fudgy, peels and halves them, and serves each one with a dollop of seasoned mayonnaise on top.
As for the rest of the week. …
Monday
What’s great about this pasta with chopped pesto and peas, also from Ali, is the pesto, in which the ingredients are chopped and mashed together with a chef’s knife, rather than a food processor or mortar and pestle. The sauce has more texture than it might have otherwise, more pop.
Tuesday
I came up with this recipe for serious potato skins to evoke the ones I used to eat at the sort of bars that turn up in Hold Steady songs. Serve them on a platter that’s fancier than its passengers and you won’t feel as if you’re in that bar.
Wednesday
Alexa Weibel’s recipe for seared fish with creamed kale and leeks is a testament to the power of a cream sauce, this one infused with leeks, thyme and a whisper of mustard. Lex calls for Arctic char as the fish, but I go with sockeye salmon.
Thursday
You don’t need a wok for this pad kee mao that Julia Moskin learned from the chef Hong Thaimee, only a Dutch oven and a desire for big flavor.
Friday
And then you can end the week with Melissa Clark’s recipe for roast chicken with tarragon, butter and cognac, which is about as urbane a dish as you can make at the end of the week. Serve with an astringent salad and a baguette warmed in the oven.
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Now, it’s many miles from anything to do with apricots or honey, but Holland Cotter’s review in The Times got me racing to see “Measuring Infinity,” the Gego show at the Guggenheim. (If you’re not in New York, this video from a 2015 exhibition gives a decent sense of the artist’s work.)
Here’s “Interior Design,” a new poem from Isabel Galleymore in The New York Review of Books.
A realization: I’ve read Brinton Turkle’s “Obadiah the Bold” probably 2,000 times, first as a child and later as an adult reading to children. You?
Finally, here’s Boygenius’s “Cool About It,” off “The Record,” which just came out. Harmonize with that all weekend. I’ll be back on Friday.
