Today we have for you:
Beefy tomatoes
Good morning. The tomatoes are in where I stay, fat and brimming with flavor, almost aching in their pulchritude. They’re best eaten uncooked, warm from the sun. I’d like to use some tonight for a grilled steak with tomato tartare (above), a smoke-kissed, tomato-forward variation on steak tartare, with rare beef paired with the deep, sweet acidity of chopped heirloom tomatoes and the classic sharp flavors of shallots, capers and chives. Grill some toast to go with it and serve over a thatch of watercress. Featured Recipe Grilled Steak With Tomato TartareAlternatively (you ate steak last night, you’re out of charcoal or propane, maybe there’s a child home for the summer, newly vegetarian), you could just cut up some tomatoes, pile them onto bread, call it a meal. I had a version of that at the restaurant Houseman in New York the other evening and have been dreaming of it ever since: tomatoes and smoked mayonnaise on focaccia. You certainly could smoke oil for mayonnaise (15 or 20 minutes in a shallow pan should do it). But if you’re not up for that adventure, you don’t need to. Just chop some tomatoes into a bowl and salt them well. Toast your focaccia. Then — and this is key — absolutely trowel your favorite mayonnaise onto the bread before piling it with tomatoes to serve with a knife and fork. “Absolutely trowel,” Houseman’s chef, Ned Baldwin, confirmed in a text message. “That’s the gesture I’m going for, man. 100 percent.” With Sunday sorted, we can turn to the rest of the week. … MondayI love Yewande Komolafe’s new recipe for a lemon-pepper zucchini pasta for how the delicate squash absorbs all the flavors of what surrounds it: lemon zest, black pepper, herbs and a couple spoonfuls of miso paste. These combine to create a fantastic sauce that clings, creamily, to the noodles, which makes for a lovely weeknight meal.
TuesdayMore tomatoes! I make Julia Moskin’s recipe for gazpacho in the morning before work so it has time to chill all day in the fridge, then serve it for dinner alongside a Spanish tortilla or, failing that, a rotisserie chicken from the store. It’s an astonishingly flavorful soup, though I serve it in Collins glasses like a drink. You’ll see! WednesdayAli Slagle’s recipe for spicy tuna salad with crispy rice is a home hack of a sushi restaurant classic where raw spicy tuna gets spooned on top of seared bricks of seasoned rice. Ali uses canned tuna in place of raw and cooks the rice in a skillet so that it forms one crisp pancake, which she breaks up on the serving plate. Top with creamy tuna salad hopped up with sriracha. So good.
ThursdayPasta alla vodka got a cool upgrade from Eric Kim after he had a tomato soup at a restaurant in Manhattan where the chef added a few dollops of ricotta to finish. He brought that fillip to his recipe for ricotta pasta alla vodka, and it’s a winner, with the cool, almost sweet cheese providing a counterbalance to the spiciness of the sauce.
FridayAnd then you can head into the weekend with a Cantonese favorite from Genevieve Ko: the pork and water chestnut lettuce wraps known as san choy bao. It’s a stir-fry of ground pork and crunchy vegetables that you pile into iceberg cups, banquet-style, and serve with hoisin sauce.
There are many thousands more recipes to cook this week awaiting you at New York Times Cooking. Please reach out for help if you find yourself flummoxed by our technology or jammed up with your account. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or if you want to register a complaint or congratulate my colleagues, you can write to me: hellosam@nytimes.com. I cannot respond to every letter. But I read each one I get. Now, it’s nothing really to do with purslane or roasted grapes, but Dwight Garner’s review in The New York Times Book Review has me itching to read Kate Riley’s debut novel, “Ruth.” “It isn’t easy of access and won’t be to everyone’s taste,” he writes, a dare I want to take. The Grub Street Diet rarely disappoints, and the chef Carlo Mirarchi’s dispatch is no exception. There’s a good fish story in The New Yorker this week, from Zach Helfand, about a finance guy catching a 52-pound Atlantic salmon on a fly last month. I’ll let him take it from there. Finally, it’s Phoebe Bridgers’s birthday. She’s 31. Here she is with “Kyoto,” music for tomato slicing. I’m off next week. My pals will take care of you. Keep cooking, and I’ll see you at the end of the month.
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