Good morning. Real talk on a Sunday: “Foodie” is a smug, unpleasant word, a diminutive, patronizing expression that reduces a person’s keen interest in the delicious to a silly fascination with cooking and eating.
“Foodie” is condescension wrapped in affectionate disdain, even for those who embrace the identity. Please avoid its use. We should all experience the freedom to cook whatever we want to cook, however we want to cook it, without judgment.
Like, for instance, this roasted salmon with peas and radishes. It profiles as superfancy, exactly the sort of dish you’d expect a foodie to cook on the weekend, with its pretty pinks and greens and oranges and its fragrantly nutty, miso-amped sauce.
Featured Recipe
Roasted Salmon With Peas and Radishes
Except anyone can make it and everyone should, for the ingredients aren’t actually precious, aren’t necessarily expensive, and the result is an elegant, painterly meal of incredible excellence, just the sort of Sunday dinner to remind you why we walk the road to the delicious. There is no need to label that journey.
As for the rest of the week. …
Monday
Tomatoes are getting better and better where I shop, growing fatter and juicier by the day. Come August I’ll be eating them three times a week. In the meantime, though: Ali Slagle’s tomato salad for a harbinger of what’s to come. Salt and lemon juice are the key. So good.
Tuesday
Kenji López-Alt’s recipe for moo shu mushrooms re-engineers an old-school Chinese restaurant classic, reversing the ratio of pork to mushrooms to allow the fungus to be the star. Serve with warm flour tortillas if you don’t want to make the more traditional pancakes, and plenty of hoisin sauce.
Wednesday
I’m a big proponent of hasselback kielbasa and generally coat mine with a mixture of apricot preserves and mustard before roasting the sausage on a sheet pan. Ali Slagle’s new recipe for grilled hasselback kielbasa with jalapeño honey takes the dish to a whole new level, tucking slices of pickled jalapeño into the accordion folds of the meat and dousing it all in a mixture of honey and mustard.
Friday
And then you can run out the week with Ashley Lonsdale’s recipe for West Indian kedgeree, a dish that was born in India’s north before being colonized by the British and then shipped to the Lesser Antilles: curried rice made rich with coconut milk, with fudgy steamed eggs and cod.
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Now, it’s a far cry from anything to do with fresh apricots or preserved lemons, but “Condor,” now streaming on Amazon Prime, is a pretty good example of what James Poniewozik, writing in The New York Times, called Mid TV. But if it pushes you toward the 1975 film that inspired the series, so much the better. Redford!
Here’s Jude Isabella in Hakai Magazine on the rise of the barred owl. They’re everywhere.
I’m super late to the Nantucket ferry, but I’ve just finished my first Elin Hilderbrand novel, “The Five-Star Weekend.” She is very, very good at her job.
Finally, here’s a new track from Lainey Wilson, “4x4xU.” Listen to that while you’re roasting your salmon. And I’ll be back next week.
