Good morning. There’s maybe no better Sunday stroll than one taken through the West Side Market in the Ohio City neighborhood of Cleveland, gathering food for a feast. You would do well with sausages — Slovenian, Italian, Midwestern brats — and a sack full of fresh cannoli, another of dried fruit, with some cheeses to cut onto fresh hard rolls. Maybe a few walleye fillets, a side of smoked whitefish? Definitely a few apple fritters, please.
And look at those ground meats, those baskets of herbs! They spur desire, a thought I can share here because you can find those ingredients yourself, wherever you stay: a mixture of beef and lamb to roll up into Turkish adana meatballs (above), excellent baked in an oven and something a little beyond that cooked on a grill.
I like the meatballs with a lemony yogurt run through with garlic, with warm pita bread and an herb salad, hot sauce on the side. It’s a lovely Sunday dinner, a flame-kissed farewell to the weekend.
Featured Recipe
Adana Meatballs
With Sunday sorted, let’s turn to the rest of the week. …
Monday
Alexa Weibel developed this intensely flavorful new recipe for crispy crumbled tofu tacos that nicely delivers on the first adjective (crispy tofu is often a lie). The avocado-lime cream that comes alongside is another revelation: a rich, tangy sauce that holds everything together. Get some cilantro on there while you’re at it, and some sliced radishes.
Tuesday
I like a savory pancake for dinner, and never more than when it’s Hetty Lui McKinnon’s recipe for a noodle okonomiyaki. It’s built on a base of ramen noodles, cabbage and seasoned eggs, and topped with a drizzle of mayonnaise. (And, if you’re me, a few dabs of totally not-Japanese chile crisp.)
Wednesday
Anna Francese Gass’s recipe for rigatoni alla zozzona combines the ingredients of the four pasta dishes that help define Rome: amatriciana, cacio e pepe, carbonara and gricia. It’s a kitchen-sink affair (“alla zozzona” translates roughly to “a big mess”), with tomato sauce, black pepper, egg yolks, cheese, guanciale and sausage to surround the pasta tubes. So good.
Thursday
Another marvel from Lex: her recipe for çilbir, a light Turkish dinner of garlicky yogurt topped with poached eggs and spicy butter, adapted from one by the cookbook author Özlem Warren. I like it with toast, to eat at the kitchen counter while watching something dumb on a screen.
Friday
And then you can head into the weekend with Mark Bittman’s excellent recipe for soy-grilled steak, an argument for quick marination and one of the great techniques for making a decent steak into an excellent one. Grab a big bowl and mix soy sauce with a little hoisin, a lot of chopped garlic and ginger, some freshly ground black pepper and a healthy squeeze of lime juice, then slide your steak into it for the time it takes to heat your grill. Get the meat on the fire and baste it a few times as it cooks. The finished masterpiece — crusty, salty-sweet — is great with fries, but I like it best with a torn baguette slathered in salted butter.
There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this week waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Wander our digital aisles. See what you find. (You’ll need a subscription to do so, of course. If you haven’t taken one out yet, would you consider subscribing today? Thanks.)
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Now, it’s nothing to do with huckleberries, king salmon or ghee, but I’ve continued my travels through Jack Carr’s vengeful and propulsive “Terminal List” novels and (only) if you thrill to geopolitics and operatic violence, you may want to join me.
News from the CBS affiliate in Roanoke, Va.: Metallica saved my family.
In case you missed it, I’d like to commend to you my colleague Joseph Bernstein’s moving account of his father’s life and death, “My Father Prosecuted History’s Crimes. Then He Died in One.”
Finally, here’s R.E.M. to play us off, “Cuyahoga.” Play that while you’re cooking, and I’ll be back next week.
Sam Sifton is an assistant managing editor, responsible for culture and lifestyle coverage, and the founding editor of New York Times Cooking.
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