A perfect pasta for not-yet-perfect tomatoes
Good morning. What an unsettling week, hot and bothered for many of us and a little scary, too. I hope you’ll be able to take some time for yourself this weekend, to look at something beautiful, to walk slowly instead of quickly, to sleep a little longer than usual and, naturally, to cook a few delicious meals. It’s surprising what a balm that can be. We’re still early in the growing season here in New York. There are tomatoes around but they’re not the great big ones we’ll get later in the summer, to eat dripping into sandwiches or planked with raw onion and doused in steak sauce. I’ll gather some cherry tomatoes instead, and cook them in olive oil until they burst, caramelizing their edges and condensing their flavor. That makes the base of the sauce in Melissa Clark’s ace recipe for pasta with cherry tomatoes (above), with pancetta, loads of mint, pecorino, a little butter for plushness, and some ricotta for more. It’s ridiculously good. I hope you’ll join me in serving it to people you love. Featured Recipe Pasta With Burst Cherry TomatoesI’m interested, too, in Paola Briseño-González’s new recipe for enchiladas Suizas, for which you swirl salsa verde into a roux to cloak cheese-blanketed tortillas wrapped around shredded chicken. Paola suggests a store-bought rotisserie chicken for the filling, and I’m taking her up on that because it’s a thrill sometimes to take a shortcut, to allow yourself a cheat. (But then I’ll feel guilty about it because I’m generally a process guy, so after dinner I’ll fold a bunch of my sourdough starter into a mixture of flour and buttermilk to proof overnight for waffles in the morning. This also makes for stellar pancakes.) I’d like to grill some baby back ribs this weekend, too, to eat with cornbread and iced tea. I’d like to roll up some spring rolls, to assemble a prosciutto and melon salad and to set up some chilled tofu with gochujang sauce. Mostly, I’d like to spend time in the kitchen not thinking about anything save the ingredients before me and how to transform them into something fantastic. (If I’m lucky, that’ll include a few soft-shell crabs to dust with flour and fry in butter. They make their own sauce!) It’s self-care. For more inspiration, head on over to New York Times Cooking and see what you find. (You need a subscription, of course. Subscriptions are the fuel in our stoves. If you haven’t taken one out yet, would you think about subscribing today? Thank you.) Please reach out for help if you find yourself in a jam with our technology or your account. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or if you’d like to say hello or lodge a complaint, you can write to me: hellosam@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read each one I get. Now, it’s some considerable distance from anything to do with blueberries or rare roast beef, but check out Chloe Covell, 15, taking gold in the street skate event at last weekend’s X Games in Osaka, Japan. Here’s a new poem from Paul Farley in the London Review of Books, “A Rewilding.” I’m deep into the Australian novelist Garry Disher’s series of noirs about a rural policeman in South Australia who sees a lot of crime. If you’d like to come along, start with “Hell to Pay” from 2014. Finally, my colleague David Renard recently reminded me of this ace Sneaker Pimps track from 1996, “6 Underground.” Listen to that while you’re cooking. I’ll see you on Sunday.
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