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What to Cook

Make Your Best Salad

A big salad.Credit...Karsten Moran 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. I spend a lot of time thinking about recipes, since recipes are my stock in trade, but the truth of the matter is that they aren’t always necessary, at least if you cook a lot, and understand the importance of balance and ratio. Take salads as an example. Read Julia Moskin’s “How to Make Salad,” and then see if you can’t assemble a substantial one on your own this evening, for dinner.

Start, as Julia notes, with some sturdy greens, since soft ones are often squashed in a big salad. Then add a few elements from each of what she calls the three major categories of big salads: fruits and vegetables, proteins and starches. Use what’s in the fridge or pick up what looks nice at the market during lunch. Aim for a nice mix of texture, of color, of shape, of taste.

Then, when you get home and have everything assembled, make a substantial dressing, something creamy, to bind everything together. This time of year, I like the idea of yogurt cut with olive oil and lemon, with plenty of kosher salt and black pepper. The idea, Julia says, is to create a mixture that is tangy and rich, with some salt to bring out the flavor of the ingredients beneath it, and a sweetness against the acidity of the lemon. Toss gently, so you don’t crush anything. Dinner! No recipe required.

Though perhaps you desire an actual recipe. I’ve got close to 18,000 on hand. You could make some braised chicken with lemon and olives this evening. Or broil some miso-coated black cod. Spicy Sichuan noodles are a terrific celebration of summer heat. Or you can look for a balm against it: Julia’s recipe for gazpacho is this season’s truest friend.

I’d like to make Melissa Clark’s recipe for roasted fish with brown butter corn sometime soon. And to revisit my recipe for miso chicken, perhaps cooking it on the grill. It’d be great, if I can find good peaches, to make Edna Lewis’s recipe for cobbler. It tastes of summer pure and sweet.

And I know I’ll pull something out of our ace collection of must-try salmon recipes real soon, because, like most Americans, I like recipes for salmon. (“Salmon” is often the most-searched term on our site, right up there with “chicken” and, seasonally, “pesto.”)

If you take out a subscription to Cooking you’ll be able to find many, many more recipes, and to organize them as you see fit in your recipe box. I hope you will do so. Among other things, it will enable us to keep our jobs. (If you run into problems along the way, write us at cookingcare@nytimes.com and we’ll get you squared.)

Now, how about some reading, totally free of charge? I love Kim Severson’s article about the two men, a married couple, both doctors, who just won the American Pie Council’s championship in Orlando, Fla., with a deep-dish checkerboard peanut-butter pie with crushed pretzels, inspired in part by the Take5 candy bar. (Here’s one of their other championship recipes, for blueberry pie.) Pie competitions sound serious-hilarious, and might make a good subject for a Christopher Guest mockumentary. “Slice of Heaven”? I’d pay to see that. Go cast it yourself now!

I’m late to it and nothing to do with food, but I also like The New Yorker’s explanation of its punctuation conventions, and how they led to the magazine’s curious rendering of the possessive indicator when applied to the president’s son’s name.

And Julia is just back from the north of Norway with a fantastic accounting of the new Fjordic cuisine, which the chef Chris Haatuft is exploring at his restaurant Lysverket, in Bergen. It’s the sort of article to make those of us who tool around with words for a living want to close the laptop and hop on a plane to Scandinavia, spend the rest of the summer exploring the coastlines and steep hills under the midnight sun. For dinner: some herring followed by a big slice of blotkake.

See you on Friday!

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