You Can Adapt It All

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Julia Gartland for The New York Times (Photography and Styling)

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

You Can Adapt It All

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Passover begins this evening, and we’re in the middle of Easter week, but celebrations of rebirth and spring joyousness are going to be difficult this year, with everyone locked down and self-isolated.

Still, I hope those celebrating can find ways to gather symbolically, to observe and feast in safety. (There’ll be plenty of ritualized washing of hands, to be sure.) And I hope all of us can strive to recognize the small moments of magic that these awful days can bring, sometimes when you least expect it.

For instance, I scored a few avocados during a surgical strike on the market the other evening, and the next day at lunch one of my kids went full no-recipe recipe on a ripe one: the flesh mashed with lime juice and salt, then spread onto toast and sprinkled with bean sprouts, red-pepper flakes, a grind or two of black pepper. The preparation was a clattery affair in the kitchen right next to the room where I was working. I grumbled about that. But then she slid a soft fried egg onto the top of one of the toasts and brought it to me for lunch and we ate together quietly and for a moment there I thought, I’m never going back to an office again.

It wouldn’t be bad to be quarantined with David Tanis, I don’t think. Check out his latest daily menu, which you can stretch out over a few days: steel-cut oats with spinach, za’atar and fried egg for breakfast; grilled chicken pita for lunch; and spicy meatballs with chickpeas for dinner.

Nor would you suffer much to be stuck with Melissa Clark. Check out her new recipe for an asparagus salad with pistachios and pecorino (above). It’s so good you don’t even need to make it with pistachios, or pecorino. Even the asparagus is negotiable. (Use broccoli instead!)

Other new recipes to explore and adapt this week include strawberry granola; sheet-pan sausage with spring onions, potatoes and mustard; five-ingredient creamy miso pasta; lentils cacciatore; and tuna noodle casserole.

And you can come visit us at NYT Cooking for more, even if you’re not a subscriber. We’ve made many more recipes than usual free for the perusing. (Of course we’d be very happy if you did subscribe, all the same, to support our work.)

You can see what we’re getting up to in our kitchens this week on our Instagram feed, and you can watch us gambol around on our YouTube channel. We post links to our news articles on Twitter. You might want to join our community group on Facebook. We visit there too. And you can reach out to us directly for help with your cooking or our technology: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, here’s a plain delight: Julia Moskin on the great cartoonist and writer Ben Katchor, who’s written a new book on Jewish culinary history, “The Dairy Restaurant.”

Another: Brett Anderson on one of the great joys of eastern North Carolina, corned ham.

It has nothing to do with blintzes or mustard, but Amy Weiss-Meyer in The Atlantic introduced me to these amazing photographs of Camille Picquot’s, taken on the Paris Metro from 2016 to 2018.

Finally, come see me At Home, a new collection page at The Times devoted to our best ideas for what to do in your house or apartment during these strange and jittery days. Check it out. I’ll be back on Friday.