Good morning. How it works in the cooking game is, an idea gets planted in your mind and then, weeks or months later, it starts to tingle and grow, to prompt a recipe or at any rate a project, something to cook, something to do. Last summer, Oliver Strand wrote about a grilled-chicken situation out in Brooklyn – Hell Chicken, at Achilles Heel, in Greenpoint – in which the chef Lee Desrosiers hangs spatchcocked birds over the glowing embers of his large and involved backyard grill to get smoky, then braises them in a pot to get them good and dense and juicy, before returning them to the fire to crisp.
I’m gonna try that this weekend with a smoker, a cast-iron pot and a kettle grill, then serve the meat with a take on Desrosiers’s miso-and-garlic condiment.
And if you won’t join me – it’s a lunatic experiment for a home cook with no fancy grill – maybe you can cook outside all the same. I wrote a whole “How to Grill” guide for Cooking, to make it easier on you.
Sticking with the oven, maybe you could bake Julia Moskin’s recipe for a lemon pudding cake. Or Laurie Colwin’s mustard chicken, which is so delicious that you may find yourself trying to track down a copy of her excellent “Home Cooking” in the morning.
A ridiculous number of other recipes to cook this weekend are available to you on Cooking. Head on over there and do some browsing, then save what’s of interest to your recipe box, so you can make it later. Put stars on the recipes you’ve cooked, and leave notes on them as well, for your own benefit or for the benefit of the community we’re building here together, helping one another cook better every day.
You can follow us on Twitter and Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. You can find me out there, too: @samsifton. And if you need help with anything technical or gustatory, don’t hesitate to reach out. Our care team is the best one going. Its members are huddled up around the table in the team room, eating brownies, ready to work. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com.
Now, some housekeeping followed by reading for the weekend. Some readers asked about the photograph of Robert Kennedy I posted a link to on Monday, the anniversary of his assassination in 1968. It was made by Burton Berinsky, and is available at the website of the J.F.K. Library.
And my colleague Dwight Garner has a column in The Times called “American Beauties,” about great old books you wouldn’t hear about much these days if he didn’t write about them. The other day, he took on one of his favorite memoirs, which happens to be one of my favorites as well, a book well worth tracking down at the library or a used book store, or in paperback or Kindle online.
It’s “On Fire,” by Larry Brown, and it’s a perfect accompaniment to summertime weekend eating and drinking, as if to join Brown at the Mississippi firehouse where he worked for 16 years for “the meals we cook and eat and the targets we shoot with our bows in the afternoons, washing our cars and trucks in the parking lot and sitting out front of the station in chairs at night hollering at people we know passing on the street.” Dwight wrote: “If this book were a restaurant, I’d eat there all the time.” So get to it. And I’ll check in with you on Sunday.
Photograph by Grant Cornett. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Theo Vamvounakis.