Good morning. We spent the last two Fridays off the grid, way up in the northlands, cooking on a wood stove, baking cobblers with the berries from the field the goats cleared. As this one starts, the sun cutting hard onto the concrete of Brooklyn, we’re hoping to recall that pastoral excellence, and hold on to the feeling all weekend long.
Which means grilled corn for dinner tonight (above), and a mess of clams with torn bread to mop up the liquor, and Melissa Clark’s summer berry buckle for dessert. We’ll listen to Son House as we cook. Won’t you join us?
Take a little time after eating to make the batter for some yeasted Belgian waffles, and Saturday morning will start with delicious promise. Slice some tomatoes onto fresh bread with a little butter and garlic for lunch and luxuriate all afternoon, reading in the shade. Need a title? Greg Grandin’s phenomenal “Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World” has been our recent companion. You should absolutely read it.
For dinner, we’re thinking of grilling up a blowout of a rib-eye steak, off Mark Bittman’s ace recipe, and serving his blue-butter sauce with it, along with some grilled romaine. Dessert: Jean Halberstam’s recipe for deep-fried peaches, which Jonathan Reynolds brought to The Times in the late summer of 2005.
What a weekend! English scones for Sunday breakfast! A Spanish tortilla with tomato-pepper salad for lunch! David Tanis’s lobster succotash for dinner, and all will be right with the world. Except for, you know, in much of it.
Other ideas for weekend cooking can be found on Cooking. Our collection of recipes for foodstuffs you should make, not buy, has been of great interest to many. Our recipe for Tartine’s country bread, which takes about two weeks to make but is totally worth it, is of great interest to me.
Save the recipes you like to your recipe box. When you’ve cooked them, you can mark them as such, and rate them on a scale of one to five stars. We’re pleased to report you can now leave notes on your recipes as well, either for yourself or for the larger community, to suggest ingredient substitutions or ideas for what to serve with the dish. Please do so!
If you run into problems along the way, either technical or philosophical, we are standing by to help. Just send a note to our team at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Social-media mavens can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram, where we use the hashtag #NYTCooking to highlight our work in the kitchen and yours. (I’m on Facebook myself, and on Twitter and Instagram.) Have a great weekend.
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