Hello all, Julia Moskin here again. My friend and yours, Melissa Clark, will be back on Wednesday.
Summer weather has fully arrived, so I’m rounding up cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers to make the season’s first gazpacho. Of all the recipes I’ve contributed to New York Times Cooking, the gazpacho I learned to make in Seville, Spain — drinkable, creamy and concentrated — is the one that I get the most fan letters about. If you think you don’t like gazpacho (and I wouldn’t blame you, based on the many versions I’ve been served that tasted like watered-down salsa), I hope you’ll give it a try.
Featured Recipe
Best Gazpacho
And then! Kenji López-Alt’s crunchy, juicy watermelon salad hits the same flavor notes as gazpacho — tangy, savory, sweet — but with extra flavor and texture from peanuts, red onions, mint and cilantro. It’s exactly what I want for lunch this week, or for dinner with Eric Kim’s tofu nuggets or a simple flank steak on the side.
Naz Deravian’s new recipe for Iranian borani-yeh esfenaj — a spinach-yogurt dip with caramelized onions, garlic and turmeric — is also a great lunch on a hot day. I’ll pair it with jammy eggs, which I’ve been eating dabbed with Duke’s mayo and showered with flaky salt and black and Aleppo pepper: instant deviled eggs.
I’ll also be making Alexa Weibel’s new recipe for pasta with asparagus and caramelized corn, one of the few ways to cook corn that tastes just as good as if it is freshly shucked and boiled. It even works with frozen kernels, like in my recipe for caramelized corn with mint (lots of butter makes that happen, of course).
Speaking of butter, Julia Child’s berry clafoutis, the sweeter French cousin to our Dutch baby pancake, would be a perfect dessert this week. I’ll make it with local dark cherries, using my new pitter, truly a gift from the kitchen gods. Too much work? Even easier is David Tanis’s dessert of sugared strawberries: A dip in red wine makes those summer berries even more of a treat.