Good morning. Melissa Clark has her recipes for sheet-pan dinners and they’re fantastic, providing fast, flavorful meals that are, among other things, easy to clean up. Our colleague Yotam Ottolenghi calls these sorts of recipes “tray bakes” (he’s British). And his are as remarkable as Melissa’s: textural, balanced symphonies, enlivened by amazing flavors.
In his column for The New York Times Magazine this week, Yotam delivered exactly such a recipe, for a one-pan paprika chicken with lentils and squash (above) that provides a trio of chicken thighs, French green lentils and kabocha squash. He dresses them with sour cream for a masterpiece of crisp and firm, creamy and acidic. It’d be a nice Saturday night meal.
Of course, so would Ali Slagle’s one-pan salmon niçoise with orzo. It’s pretty neat: You cook the orzo with shallots and olives and then, in the last few minutes, nestle in the salmon and some green beans. Topped with a simple vinaigrette made with Dijon mustard, vinegar, raw shallot and tomatoes, it feels like a summer vacation meal — perfect for the middle of February.
Alternatively, how about Nonya Hokkien stir-fried noodles? Or rigatoni al forno with cauliflower and broccoli rabe? Roasted fish with lemon, sesame and herb breadcrumbs? I’d very much like to make these red-cooked beef short ribs this weekend. And what about this marvelous new recipe for orange rolls? You remember the Pillsbury version from the supermarket? Like that, but way better.
And I’d really like to make at least one dish without a recipe at all, working off of memory and instinct, figuring the cooking out along the way. (Around here we call that cooking a no-recipe recipe.) For instance, this crazy “tornado” omelet I had last week at Houseman in Manhattan, with raclette and maitake mushrooms, dressed with maple syrup and soy sauce.
The tornado part seems pretty easy: a continuous swirl of the scrambled eggs in an unholy amount of butter, until they’re just about set. Fold a plank or two of deeply seared maitake into that mix with a healthy sprinkle of shredded raclette (or Gruyère, if that’s what’s available) then dress the whole with a light mixture of maple and soy. It’s incredibly good. Why don’t we give it a try?
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Now, it has nothing to do with Honeycrisp apples or line-caught swordfish, but you should read Patrick Sauer’s story about the novelist S.E. Hinton in Smithsonian magazine, “S.E. Hinton Is Tired of Talking About ‘The Outsiders.’ No One Else Is.”
There was a packed house at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society last weekend. Coyotes have been spotted on the island, and everyone wants to know what to do about that.
In The New Yorker, here’s Mariana Enriquez’s new short story, “My Sad Dead.”
Finally, my colleagues Sadie Stein and Gilbert Cruz went on The New York Times Book Review podcast the other day to discuss Carmela Ciuraru’s new book, “Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages.” And their conversation was just great. Give it a listen, and I will see you on Sunday.
