Cooking: Crushed Tomatoes - Milwaukee Times Weekly Newspaper

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

WEDNESDAY, JULY 26, 2017

SAM SIFTON

Good morning. A squirrel ate the tomatoes growing in my yard, that I had been tending closely in the heat, that I had fertilized with a tincture of seaweed, that I had put on a table so that they could grab a little more sun, that I had talked to because some people believe that helps them grow. He was a big fellow with haunted eyes, more dirty-blond than gray, with a long, unkempt tail, and he took from me my dream for a no-recipe recipe for tonight: fat slices of homegrown heritage tomato sprinkled with salt and drizzled with balsamic vinegar, alongside garlic-rubbed toast made from my sourdough no-knead bread. The plants are in tatters now. Farmers have the hardest job.

Nothing to do but make Ian Fisher’s recipe for spaghetti carbonaratonight, watch Floyd Mayweather fight Conor McGregor in Las Vegas on pay-per-view, and consider new options for urban farming moving forward. No depression! A crop cage is in my future.

Things I want to cook this week that don’t involve tomatoes: David Tanis’s new recipe for grilled duck breast with miso-sesame glaze; Dave Kim’s new recipe for samgyetang, a boiling-hot soup made with a whole small chicken stuffed with gingery glutinous rice; a big tray of my old recipe for spiedies, to serve with Italian bread and plenty of hot sauce.

I’d like to make some shrimp burgers. Also, chicken Marengo(above). And mapo tofu. Maybe I can’t grow produce successfully. But I can make my own yogurt. I can grill my own flounder. I can make Melissa Clark’s recipe for a West Indian lamb curry.

Thousands more recipes to cook in coming days (including many recipes for tomatoes) are available on Cooking. Go take a look at them. And take out a subscription to Cooking when you do, please, for all our sakes. It’ll make it possible for you to save the recipes you like to your recipe box. You’ll be able to organize them, and rate them and leave notes on them, for yourself and for others. It’s not too complicated. But if anything goes wrong, please reach out for help and we’ll get you all fixed up: cookingcare@nytimes.com.

Now, please read Eric Asimov’s delightful account of his recent visit with Martin Walker, the British journalist who writes the “Bruno, Chief of Police” novels set in the Périgord region of southwestern France. It’ll make you want to book passage for Bergerac.

Also, in High Country News, read Julia O’Malley’s dispatch from a Yupik village in northwestern Alaska, where she wrote about a teenage whaler. It has about the best first sentence of any article I’ve read in 2017.

And, finally, nothing to do with food, do read Ryan Bradley’s feature in The New York Times Magazine, about Hollywood dialect coaches in the era of Peak TV. I’ll see you on Friday.