Good morning. A few years ago, my colleagues and I put together “A Field Guide to the American Sandwich” for The Times. It was a celebratory taxonomy, in the main, but we were lucky to pick up a few helpful recipes along the way, including Julia Moskin’s invaluable one for grilled cheese (above).
Now, you’d think you wouldn’t need a recipe for grilled cheese, that grilled cheese could really be part of our regular Wednesday tradition of no-recipe recipes, that all you really need to do is slap some cheese into a sandwich and sauté it in a pan. But Julia’s recipe puts the lie to that, with all kinds of helpful advice that will elevate your grilled cheese sandwich from passable to extraordinary, with just a few swipes of mayonnaise and careful consideration of the ratio of cheese to bread.
So perhaps that could be dinner tonight, and, if you like, you could add to it a no-recipe recipe flourish, taken from the refrigerator: the addition to the sandwich of some leftover chicken or pork or steak, a little dip or gochujang sauce, a few pickles, some sliced jalapeño, the tail end of a beefsteak tomato, maybe a fried egg. It’s the simplest kind of cooking, and on a Wednesday night in August that’s exactly what most of us need.
Though perhaps you’re in the mood for an actual recipe? Tejal Rao is just back from interior Maine, with a delightful profile of the chef Erin French of the Lost Kitchen restaurant in Freedom. To go with it, she offers two recipes from Ms. French’s new cookbook.
One is for halibut niçoise, a dish in which the main components of a classic salad are accounted for, but totally reconfigured into a dish that’s warmer and more substantial. (No halibut? Try fluke or flounder, turbot or cod.) The other is for a chilled golden beet and buttermilk soup, which layers bright and carefully balanced acidity into a marvelous whole. Serve with grilled garlic bread, is what I’m thinking.
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Then, in matters far outside the kitchen, check out Abe Streep’s big piece in Outside, on how the lifestyle and technical-clothing company Patagonia has gone to war with the Trump administration, a political act that happens to have been very good for sales.
And if you’re looking for a very smart, very funny, very dark crime novel that’s more literary than pulp, pull up Edward Conlon’s “Red on Red,” which I missed when it came out in 2011. It’s just terrific.