Good morning. Our Julia Moskin is back after hard duty in France, where she spent a few days living in Julia Child’s old house in Provence, shopping in the same stores Child frequented and cooking in her kitchen. She wrote up the experience for The Times today, a beautiful story that manages at once to illuminate Child’s history and to inspire us to cook more, and better.
Naturally, there are recipes. Julia made a pretty potato gratin layered with onions, tomatoes and a paste of garlic, anchovies and basil that we’d like to eat, um, tonight. She also made a recipe for beef daube, adapted from the cookbook author and former New York Times writer Patricia Wells, that swaps out two bottles of the traditional red wine for two bottles of white. See you on Friday!
And she made a recipe from Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” that she had never seen before: La Tentation de Bramafam, “a fluffy eggplant-walnut dip with a clear connection to dishes like baba ghanouj. … It is tasty, absurdly easy, and must have been somehow slipped past La Super-Française, as it contains raw ginger and hot sauce, two of the least-French ingredients imaginable.” (Julia’s writing is so delicious!)
So start with that, and see where it takes you. Or if you want to partake of our Wednesday tradition of cooking without proper recipes, you could join us for some barbecued salmon.
My fridge has all kinds of barbecue sauce left over from various experiments conducted over the course of the last few weekends. Yours may as well, or maybe you have a half-jar of the store-bought kind. Check: You probably do. Now either get some fresh hot cherry peppers from the market or, if you’re jammed for time, a jar of the pickled sort. If you have fresh, roast four or five of them into soft compliance in the oven and cut them into your barbecue sauce and heat it all through on the stove, with a few pats of butter just because. And if you don’t, just mince the pickled version and add it to the sauce, also with a few pats of butter just because.
Meanwhile, heat your oven to 400. Take some salmon fillets and put them on a lightly oiled, foil-covered sheet pan. Salt-and-pepper them and put them into the oven for 10 or 12 minutes, or until they are just barely cooked through. Spoon that pepper-studded barbecue sauce over the top and go to!
Want an actual recipe? Here’s one for shrimp scampi from Melissa Clark. Here’s another, for curried tofu with soy sauce. Here’s a third, for a spinach and bacon tartine. And shouldn’t you be doing something about all those zucchini your neighbor left on the porch? Melissa’s recipe for an olive oil zucchini bread abides like the Dude. (As does, by the way, Julia’s recipe for zucchini carpaccio.)
Navigate your way over to Cooking for other ideas for what to cook tonight and in coming days. Save the recipes you like and get to them soon as you can. Then rate them and leave notes on them if you’ve got good intel to share about substitutions, techniques, pairings and the like. And if you run into any problems, holler for help. We monitor cookingcare@nytimes.com.
Now, go read Francis Lam’s column in The Times Magazine about the cooking of the Garifuna, descendants of intermarried Africans and Caribs who live on the Atlantic coast of Honduras, Nicaragua, Belize and Guatemala. Then make his recipe for hudutu. Oh, man!
