Cooking
This charred corn and chickpea salad with lime crema is fast and easy, and it’s already a hit with readers.
I know I just recently wrote about a different Hetty Lui McKinnon recipe — her dumpling and smashed cucumber salad, and quite, er, effusively — but look at this charred corn and chickpea salad. The burnished little corn nuggets, together with plump lil’ chickpeas! The peppery arugula and tender cilantro! Everything bound together with a simplified crema, a mix of sour cream, lime juice, garlic, salt and pepper! You’ll excuse me for my excitement over another Hetty hit.
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Charred Corn and Chickpea Salad With Lime Crema
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I also love the look of this lazi ji — Chongqing chicken with chiles — a Fuchsia Dunlop recipe adapted by Ligaya Mishan. And I love eating it; using my chopsticks to hunt through the rustling dried chiles to pluck out the tender chicken morsels feels like a treasure hunt. As Fuchsia notes, don’t eat those dried chiles! They’re there to provide fragrance and season the oil (and, of course, provide hiding places for your chicken).
Though if you don’t like playing hide and seek with your poultry (extremely fair), there’s Ali Slagle’s crispy baked chicken, with pull-apart tender meat and bronzed skin. This is a great recipe for that spice mix your friends gifted you as thanks for watching their dog while they were on vacation. Swap Ali’s suggested spices (but keep the sugar, for optimal flavor and browning) for Montreal steak seasoning, ras el hanout, five spice, garam masala, adobo, baharat, jerk seasoning. …
Speaking of searching for things, I’m always on the lookout for recipes that use canned seafood other than tuna — I can’t resist a nice-looking can of good quality fish or shellfish. (Shout out to my dear friend Soraya, who let me spend an hour in the canned seafood aisle of El Corte Inglés.) This garlicky crab and brown butter pasta from Cybelle Tondu looks wonderful. I’m sure it’s transcendent with fresh crab, but let’s be real: Garlic, brown butter and lemon make pretty much anything tasty and are sure to enliven my canned crab.
You’ve signed up for our August Grilling Challenge with Wirecutter, yes? Every Tuesday this month, my colleague Sofia Sokolove and I are combining our newsletter powers to bring you everything you need — namely the best gear recommendations and recipes — to get grilling and stay grilling well into fall. This week we covered the basics, and next week we’ll help you throw an excellent cookout. Bookmark Ali’s bountiful barbecue vegetable salad and make sure you’re on the list so you don’t miss a challenge.
I’ll leave you with Genevieve Ko’s molten chocolate muffins, her take on the Olympic chocolate muffins that went viral during the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. If you’ve ever wanted a more portable version of those awesome ’90s lava cakes, this is the recipe for you.