Good morning. One of the great things to eat in New York City right now is a dish called celery Victor, served at Inga’s Bar in Brooklyn Heights. It’s a cold salad based on one that came out of a San Francisco hotel more than a century ago: braised stalks of celery in vinaigrette, with anchovies. At Inga’s Bar, fresh celery, greens and herbs join the plate, along with big chunks of Parmesan and dabs of pickled mustard seeds.
It’s not just me who loves this thing. Our own Pete Wells, who reviewed Inga’s in May, raved about it. As has most everyone I’ve sent to the restaurant, where invariably they take time to text me a photograph of the celery Victor accompanied by heart emojis and OMGs.
Some editors send reporters to cover parades or hearings of the Water Board. At New York Times Cooking, we send them to kitchens. Our own Alexa Weibel returned from Inga’s with enough reporting on the chef Sean Rembold’s cooking to develop a recipe for his celery Victor (above) that all can make at home. I could eat that salad once a week. I hope, if you make it today, that you will feel the same.
Monday
Here’s an easy win for the top of the week: a sheet-pan dinner of roasted feta with chickpeas and tomatoes. The cheese and tomatoes soften below a drizzled mixture of olive oil, honey and chile flakes, and the chickpeas soak up all the flavors. That and some toast? All good!
Tuesday
More tomatoes, this time cooked down with a ton of chiles and spices for this fast-track version of the Pakistani dish known as chicken karahi, excellent with basmati rice.
Wednesday
Try this harissa and miso spaghetti, and you won’t ever look at carbonara quite the same way again. Big spice! Big umami! It might make your monthly rotation.
Thursday
When was the last time you cooked a pork tenderloin? This recipe for a hoisin-glazed pork bowl with vegetables gives the meat a kind of char siu treatment, and may remind you of its deliciousness. Leftovers will make for killer fried rice.
Friday
And then you can welcome the weekend with this fried snapper with Creole sauce, which calls for weeknight-friendly fillets instead of the more traditional whole fish. It’s delicious with a generous few shakes of hot sauce.
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Now, it’s nothing to do with bacon or parsnips, but “via ferratas” — iron paths of steel rungs, bridges, ladders and cables permanently bolted into wilderness rock walls and ledges — are appearing across Colorado, to the delight of thrill seekers who don’t have much (if any) mountaineering or rock climbing experience. But as Julie Dugdale wrote for 5280, that might not actually be a good thing.
It was originally published in 1999, but I just caught up to it now, and, if you haven’t read it, I think you ought to: “Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950,” by Martin Russ.
Trainspotting, American style, in Smithsonian Magazine. Cool photography. And in The Times, too: For the first time in 50 years, you can take a train from New York to the Berkshires.
Finally, here’s a poem from Ben Lerner in The New York Review of Books, “Meridian Response.” Read that, and I’ll be back on Monday.
