Cooking
This time with smashed cucumbers and an umami-rich peanut sauce.
Hi, everyone! Mia here, your New York Times Cooking newsletter editor, filling in for Melissa Clark while she’s on vacation.
Sometimes the sequel is as good as, if not better than, the original. (Universally acknowledged case in point: “The Empire Strikes Back.”) With that in mind, here is Hetty Lui McKinnon’s new recipe for dumpling and smashed cucumber salad with peanut sauce.
Hetty’s first NYT Cooking dumpling salad recipe is a stone-cold classic, a five-star summer stunner with tomatoes, basil and a chile-crisp vinaigrette. Her new recipe keeps the dumplings and chile-crispness, but swaps the tomatoes for smacked cucumbers (well, smashed, but smacked is more fun) and an umami-rich peanut sauce. Like its predecessor, it’s fast and easy and it will be on repeat in my home. I love it. “I know,” says Hetty.
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Dumpling and Smashed Cucumber Salad With Peanut Sauce
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It’s admittedly been a while since I’ve had a Filet-O-Fish, but I’ll wager that Sue Li’s fried fish sandwich is better than the original. White fish fillets are given a shaggy panko coating and shallow-fried until golden, and then topped with sunny American cheese and a dilly tartar sauce. I’d like mine with some air-fried fries and a Diet Coke, please.
Every summer cooking newsletter must include a zucchini recipe, so here are Ali Slagle’s beloved chicken-zucchini meatballs with feta. I’ll let Eliza, a reader, take it from here: “I make these meatballs ALL THE TIME. They have truly entered my weekly rotation. They make a delicious lunch, snack, or dinner (I like to add them to a ‘Mediterranean’ plate with homemade tabbouleh, hummus, carrots and pita).”
And for your eggplant, this weeknight-fast eggplant caponata pasta with ricotta and basil from Alexa Weibel. The first time I made this recipe, my husband took one bite and said we should make it again, so there’s that.
Fennel’s peak season is usually fall, but I can’t resist its refreshing, fragrant crunch. It also stays fresh in my fridge for a good while, making Yasmin Fahr’s fennel and lentil salad with caper-mustard dressing a good pantry dinner option.
I’ll leave you with this dulce de leche chocoflan, whose name stopped me in my scrolling tracks. Then I read the intro for this recipe by Esteban Castillo, adapted by Genevieve Ko: “Also known as el pastel imposible (the impossible cake), chocoflan is a baking wonder, its layers of chocolate cake batter and dulce de leche flan swapping places in the oven and coming out as a tiered two-desserts-in-one showstopper.” Chocolate cake and dulce de leche flan, somersaulting in the same dessert — hello there!
That’s all from me today! Eric Kim will be with you on Wednesday.