Good morning. I love Melissa Clark’s new recipe for roasted cauliflower with pancetta, olives and crisp Parmesan (above), a deeply flavorful dish that could become a weeknight go-to for you these next couple of months. I love, too, Yasmin Fahr’s recipe for spicy baked butternut squash pasta with spinach, same deal.
But I also know that Wednesdays can be tough for cooks stuck in the horse latitudes of the week: becalmed, frustrated, unable to imagine passage forward. If that’s you, that’s fine, it’s normal. Just order a pizza and pile a salad on top of it. It’s a classic no-recipe recipe for injecting ease of preparation into the dinner hour, with a payoff that’s a little eccentric and a lot delicious.
I enjoy a lemony-bright herb salad on my pizza (about which: sausage and black olives, this time?), but you can go the other direction: chopped romaine and a healthy drizzle of ranch dressing. Or, really, use whatever salad you like. The important thing is the interplay of textures and flavors and temperatures. Salad pizza! That’ll get you back on track.
And here’s something to make when that happens: pumpkin-ginger oat scones, from Genevieve Ko, who recently joined NYT Cooking as a senior editor. She came to us from The Los Angeles Times. Please make her welcome.
It’s nothing to do with poults or cranberries, but I’ve got some new fiction for you to read: “Transit,” by Khaddafina Mbabazi, in the Virginia Quarterly Review.
And I’ve really been enjoying the Indian crime drama “Paatal Lok,” on Amazon Prime, in particular for the acting of Jaideep Ahlawat. You’ll see what I mean.
Finally, here’s my old colleague Stephanie Clifford in Marker, writing about MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife and one of the world’s richest women, and how she is rewriting the philanthropy playbook. Enjoy that, too, and I’ll be back on Friday.