Good morning. I don’t generally give investment advice, but this is almost certain: You should place a buy order for a heavy cast iron griddle if you have access to a gas or charcoal grill. You can use it to prepare outdoor breakfasts with bacon and eggs, grilled cheeses for lunch or impressively crispy smash burgers. In the evening, like Chef Francis Mallmann, you make a flattened pork butt, as in his pork and peach recipe.
I cook fish on my griddle, which is much easier than grilling the fillets on the (always sticky) grid. Potatoes too: cook them until almost cooked through, then cut them in half and cook on the baking sheet until the cut edges are golden brown and crisp. Cubes of polenta. Spears of asparagus. Lamb chops. Rounds of pineapple. Rinse and repeat.
Tonight’s recipe: Pupusas with grilled cheese and curtido. They’re great already, but if you grate a zucchini through the cheese and mix well before pressing it into the dough? That makes an exceptional pupusa. Enjoying.
As for the rest of the week…
Monday
I’ll follow Eric Kim’s lead and make a salmon rice bowl (above): diced boneless fillets marinated in a mixture of mirin and doenjang, then roasted hot and quickly. Serve with rice, which absorbs both the salty-sweet glaze and the fat from the salmon to a wonderful effect.
Tuesday
This creamy lemon chive paste elevates allium from garnish to base ingredient. But that can be costly if you don’t have chives in your yard or a pot tied to your fire escape. In that case, simmer some thinly sliced leeks in heavy cream until soft, then proceed as you would with the chives. (Or make simple creamy lemon paste instead.)
Wednesday
I love this mid-week sesame beak chicken salad, as good a chicken breast as you can imagine, with crunchy tender peas set against the tender chunks of meat, in a creamy sesame dressing. Note: The recipe says it makes 2 to 4 servings. But if you’re serving four as a main, it’s best to double everything.
Thursday
Here’s a coconut milk shrimp preparation that takes inspiration from elements of both Indian and Thai curries. You brush the shrimp with ginger, garlic and turmeric, sear them and finish them with a stew in the coconut milk. Spinach tops it all off and I serve the finished dish with rice.
More ideas for cooking this week are waiting for you at DailyExpertNews Cooking. To be blunt: you need a subscription to access it. Subscriptions support our work and keep it going. If you haven’t already, I hope you subscribe today. Thank you.
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Now it’s a long way from anything to do with cloves or duck eggs, but please don’t miss Penelope Green’s obituary of Larry Woiwode, a 1970s New York literary star who left fame to live with his family on a farm in North America. to go live. Dakota. “Most of life seems to me to be a religious experience,” he told DailyExpertNews in 1988. “I mean, I guess it either is or it isn’t, and for me it is.” Wowode was 80.
Julian Lucas introduced me to Ishmael Reed’s 1969 western satire, “Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down” in The New York Review of Books. I’m going to the library now.
Here’s Caitlin Flanagan on Joan Didion, in The Atlantic.
Finally it’s Novak Djokovic’s birthday. He’s 35. Check out some epic points he’s won, then aim to cook the same way. I’ll be back on Monday!
