Good morning. The sports are fishing hard on the East End of Long Island these days, chasing the fall run of false albacore, striped bass and bluefish. I won’t take any of them, save a few bluefish for pâté. The others are worth more in the water. Season to season, I like to see them grow.
So for dinner this weekend, I’ll need to look to the freezer. I’m thinking wild salmon from Alaska — some fillets of king, some sides of sockeye — perfect for roasting under a glaze of brown sugar and mustard (above).
You don’t need a recipe for that, only good fish. The sugar and mustard will do the rest. Just keep an eye on the fillets as they roast in a hot oven, so you can pull them at just the point where the meat begins to go opaque, closer to warm at the center than hot. I like that with braised greens and, if it’s chilly outside, mashed potatoes. It’s a fine dinner after a long day on the water.
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Of course, with a cold front forecast to pass through from the north today and tomorrow, it might be a short day on the water. That’s fine. Project cooking can fill the hours and bring as much satisfaction as racing around in pursuit of gamefish. It certainly beats lying around on the couch.
If the wind’s howling, I might make Carolina Gelen’s new recipe for ravioles du Dauphiné, a specialty of southeastern France, small sheets of mini ravioli that you coat with a buttery wine sauce and tease apart on the plate, bite by bite.
I’ll be straight with you. The first one you slide into simmering pasta water with a bench scraper may well fall apart, just the way the first pancake of any weekend breakfast is a disaster and goes to the dog. But keep at it. With practice, the cooking gets easier. And the resulting flavor bombs are worthy of royalty.
The end of summer brings apple picking, too, if you’re game for the traffic to get to the orchards. I’ll use some of a bag of u-picks to make Yossy Arefi’s recipe for apple crumb cake, plush and caramelized and buttery-crumbly all at once. (I’ll use the rest for apple butter, one of my favorite tastes of almost-fall.)
And are you game for pork braciole for Sunday supper? Or a Guinness pie? I could see eating either one on the couch while the Chiefs-Giants game spools out on the big screen in front of it. Mind you don’t get sauce all over the throw pillows. With chewy brown butter cookies for dessert? Yes, please.
There are many thousands more recipes to cook this weekend awaiting you at New York Times Cooking. Write for help if you find yourself caught in a technological rip current or at odds with your account. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise. Or you can write to me with complaints or compliments. I’m at hellosam@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I do read each one I get.
Now, it’s a considerable distance from anything to do with butterscotch or spatchcocking, but I raced through “Clown Town,” Mick Herron’s ninth book in the Slough House series. Start with the first if all of these words are unfamiliar. Herron’s slow horses are thoroughbreds, really. (He was terrific recently in an interview with The Times.)
Kelefa Sanneh’s just great on Bad Bunny, in The New Yorker.
Texas history in Texas Monthly: Here’s Lea Konczal on the complicated life and legacy of LeRoy Colombo, an extremely Texas-famous deaf lifeguard on Galveston’s beaches in the first half of the 20th century.
Finally, here’s new music from the Brothers Comatose, “Golden Grass.” Listen to that while you’re cooking. I’ll see you on Sunday.