What’s Your Favorite Late-Summer Meal?

Corn salad with tomatoes and feta, tomato sandwiches, and more options for the second half of August.

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By Sam Sifton

Good morning. Tuna continue to crash around the New York Bight eating baitfish, and fishermen I know continue to drop off gifts of belly and loin. A recipe I’ve been making a lot, which you could make with yellowfin or salmon from the store, is this East Coast take on Hawaiian poke (above).

I took the advice of some subscribers who wrote notes on the recipe and added cubed, just-ripe avocado, sliced jalapeño, toasted sesame seeds and a spray of lime juice when I served it over seasoned sushi rice. This was outstanding counsel.

Tuna poke is catching up with tomato sandwiches and grilled corn as my favorite late-summer meal. Corn salad with tomatoes, feta and mint is a contender, too, as is this one-pot orzo with tomatoes, corn and zucchini.

Other dishes I’m thrilling to these days: pan-seared ranch chicken with its crisp skin and incredibly moist meat; baked tofu with peanut sauce and coconut-lime rice; and this incredible recipe for spicy and tingly beef that Tejal Rao adapted from a dish Jason Wang serves at his Xi’an Famous Foods in New York. Tejal suggests that the sauce would be terrific served with a big pile of sautéed mushrooms, and she’s absolutely correct. (Tear some oyster mushrooms into bite-size pieces and sear them in an oil-slicked cast-iron pan until deep golden brown and crisp, then combine with the sauce and reduce over medium heat.)

But perhaps you don’t want to heat up your kitchen. I get that. We’ve got some super-easy slow-cooker recipes that’ll help. Also, this elegant cherry tomato Caesar salad. Ice-cold schav? Watermelon gazpacho? Cold noodles with tomatoes? I believe in you. You’ll make something great.

Thousands and thousands more recipes are waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Just as an example: this whole-orange snack cake. (You can find further inspiration on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.) You do, yes, need a subscription to access the recipes. Subscriptions support our work. I ask all the time and won’t disappoint now: If you haven’t yet taken one out yet, would you please consider subscribing today? Thank you.

We are standing by should you run into rough waters while signing up or using our technology: [email protected]. Someone will get back to you. And you can always write to me if they don’t, or if you’d like to tell me your favorite late-summer meal: [email protected]. I read every letter sent.

Now, it’s nothing to do with the best jarred artichoke hearts or the price of skirt steak, but if you missed Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram’s Times investigation into “The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score,” you ought to read it right now. Scary!

The Michelin Guide is coming to Toronto. Mathew Silver of Toronto Life spoke to Andrew Weir, the executive vice president of Destination Toronto, the city’s tourism marketing organization, about how that came to be. Sausage made, and not inexpensively: “We paid initially for the Michelin inspectors to come into the market for months at a time, and that has evolved into a broader marketing partnership, which needed to happen for the guide to become a reality.”

I think you’ll like Hua Hsu’s “Personal History,” in The New Yorker, on his father and Kurt Cobain.

Finally, here’s Jess Smith’s poem, “Valentine,” winner of the Hayden’s Ferry Review inaugural poetry contest. I’ll be back on Friday.

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