A Superquick Sicilian Pasta With Anchovies and Cauliflower

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With a nutty, crunchy bread crumb topping.

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By Sam Sifton

Good morning. Anna Francese Gass has a fine new recipe for pasta with anchovies, cauliflower and nutty bread crumbs (above), her adaptation of a Sicilian pasta alla Paolina con cavolfiore from Palermo, in which you melt oil-packed anchovies in a hot pan, then combine them with tomato sauce and a blend of cinnamon and cloves. A crunchy mixture of almonds and bread crumbs goes on top. The combination is incredible, a taste of the Mediterranean that you can enjoy wherever you hang your hat.

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Anna's pasta is my Sunday dinner this week, and if it reminds me more of leisurely meals taken after a long day of fishing in Venezuela than ones eaten after counting Madonnas at the Palazzo Bellomo, well, that's just my lived experience.

As for the rest of the week. …

I love the nuance of Alexa Weibel's lemony pea and spinach soup, with its grassy flavors of celery, leeks and vermouth that inch up to but never overpower the sweetness of the peas and spinach. Make sure to read the notes our subscribers have made on the recipe. There are ingredient swaps galore!

Yasmin Fahr developed this recipe for salmon and couscous salad with a cucumber-feta dressing that pays homage to green goddess dressing and the Persian side dish mast-o khiar. I like it in large part because it's a light dinner, with less salmon than you’d use if you were serving fillets. (I don't know if it's just me, but the size of my protein portions has been way down since the pandemic. Dunno why!)

Employing a novel technique for crisping the tofu, Ali Slagle's recipe for green curry glazed tofu is a top-notch weeknight dinner, one you’ll knock out in roughly the amount of time it takes to cook the rice you’ll eat it with. So good.

Another excellent option from Ali: You cannot go wrong coating a chicken cutlet in sour cream and onion dip, breading it with panko and shallow-frying it to crisp perfection.

And then you can head into the weekend with Julia Reed's recipe for shrimp and grits, which she picked up in 2002 in landlocked Sewanee, Tenn., to no ill effect. For what it's worth, I make the grits with equal parts water and milk, and add a splash of cream and a bunch of freshly ground black pepper at the end. For the shrimp, I follow the instructions to the letter.

There are thousands and thousands more recipes waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. You need a subscription to read them, it's true. Subscriptions make this whole enterprise possible. If you haven't taken one out yet, I really hope you will consider subscribing today. Thank you!

Have an issue with our technology? It happens. Write to us at [email protected] and someone will get back to you. Want to say hello or get something off your chest? Write to me at [email protected]. I can't respond to every letter. But I read every one I get.

Now, it's a far cry from baking cookies or rendering duck fat, but there are some things in the world that you ought to be aware of and one of them is Teju Cole's essay in The New York Times Magazine about the Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He sees the trouble in the paintings, inextricably linked to their beauty.

I enjoyed the baker Rick Easton's dinner diary for Grub Street last week.

Here's a short story by Madeline ffitch in Harper's Magazine that you ought to read, "Seeing Through Maps."

Finally, our Jon Pareles turned me on to Squid's new track, "The Blades," post-punk prog-rock that’d make an excellent accompaniment to your kitchen high jinks. Listen to that and I’ll be back on Friday.

Sam Sifton is an assistant managing editor, responsible for culture and lifestyle coverage, and the founding editor of New York Times Cooking. @samsifton • Facebook

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