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.

Or you could make miso chicken, pair it with stir-fried chard and red peppers. You could make oven-steamed salmon and serve it with David Tanis’s recipe for new potatoes baked in parchment. Maybe stir up some grits and shrimp, reimagined by the chef David Chang? Or make a tuna salad composée, as outlined by the cocktail wizard Toby Cecchini?

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Now, please take a moment to read about the life and work of the legendary book editor Judith Jones, who has died at 93. And check out this collection of recipes honoring her work with Julia Child.

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.