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What to Cook

A Perfect Dinner

Pasta with mint, basil and fresh mozzarella.Credit...Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Sam Sifton emails readers of Cooking five days a week to talk about food and suggest recipes. That email also appears here. To receive it in your inbox, register here.

Good morning. Melissa Clark has a terrific new recipe this week that could make a perfect dinner for you this evening: pasta with mint, basil and fresh mozzarella. It’s light and flavorful enough that, tomorrow, you can go hard at the fat and flavor and still have balance in your life, with a new recipe from David Tanis, for old-fashioned scalloped corn. I’d pair that with fried chicken and pretend it was Saturday night, no work in the morning, just a long walk along the beach and a deep dive into Greg Iles’s “Natchez Burning” trilogy into the afternoon.

No? Have to be in a conference room at 9, to talk deliverables on that Q3 project that looks questionable even for Q4? Have to be at the day camp at 8, to drop off a kid? Have an early morning appointment with the dermatologist or the angry guy at the D.M.V.? Slide out early on Tuesday afternoon, and make my adaptation of Daniel Boulud’s recipe for chicken tagine instead. You’ll be on time and happy in the morning, and that’s our whole reason for existence right there.

You can take up some project cooking later in the week, when heads have cooled. I like Florence Fabricant’s new recipe for striped bass all’Amatriciana, except I’ve vowed not to buy or kill striped bass until I start seeing a lot more of them in the waters where I used to see many and now see very few. I’ll cook it with porgy, maybe with weakfish. Use what’s available to you. It’ll be a very good feed.

And I love Gabrielle Hamilton’s new recipe for braised beef tongue, which she serves with sauce gribiche. Read her excellent “Eat” column on the subject, and you may grow to love the idea yourself, and then make it. As Gabrielle writes, “Tongue is one fine piece of meat.”

You could bake a Provençal tomato and squash gratin for dinner, make like you’re a poet on holiday. Or pork chops with Dijon sauce, as if you were a burgher in an ale house. You could stir up a roasted vegetable bibimbap. You could assemble a salade Lyonnaise.

The idea is just to surf around our offerings on Cooking, and see what strikes your fancy for right now or very soon. And then to follow through: to make that recipe for dinner, a gift to those who assemble around you.

Thousands and thousands of recipes are available to you once you’ve taken out a subscription to Cooking (dozens are if you don’t). I do hope you will join us, as subscriptions are the fuel that allow our machines to continue to rumble and produce great recipes for your use. (You can receive help with the process of signing up by writing our Care Team at cookingcare@nytimes.com.)

Now, please listen to Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris talk about Jay-Z and Beyoncé on their recent “Still Processing” podcast, even if you don’t know – maybe especially if you don’t know – anything about Jay-Z and Beyoncé.

Here are 73 questions for the model Gigi Hadid, on the Vogue site, and it’s a little weird. (Celebrity is weird.)

Finally, George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music” had its premiere on this day in 1717, as King George I sailed down the River Thames in London with an accompaniment of 50 musicians on a barge. The BBC told the tale nicely during the BBC Proms in 2012. Watch and listen!

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