Good Bread Good Meat Good God Let's Eat : The New York Times Recipes

Spring ramen bowl with snap peas and asparagus.

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2016

SAM SIFTON

Good morning. Kim Severson has a terrific read in today's Food section of The Times on the chef Art Smith and his efforts to revitalize his hometown, Jasper, Fla. (It comes with a fine recipe for cake.) Enjoy.
And we have cool videos for you to watch as well: about the Nigerian food evangelist Tunde Wey and his recipe for jollof rice; aboutAdrienne Cheatham, the executive chef of Marcus Samuelsson's Red Rooster restaurant in Harlem, and her recipe for beer-brined roast chicken; and about Eduardo Rivera, a Mexican-born organic farmer in Minnesota, and his recipe for tomatillo and pineapple salsa.
Maybe one of those will suggest your dinner tonight. (We'd love to pair Mr. Rivera's salsa with some garlic sautéed shrimp for tacos.) On Wednesdays, after all, we don't always cook from recipes as if they were laws, but instead offer them as suggestions – as directions we'd like to take our cooking in the middle of the week.
For instance, there's a Japanese dish known as "dam curry." You take a bowl, make a dam out of white rice in the middle of it, and ladle Japanese-style curry onto one side of the partition. Steamed vegetables can make a kind of forest on the other side. (Look at these photos for inspiration.)
For the curry, sauté some ground pork in butter and, when it starts to brown, add to it a few tablespoons of curry powder and a few more of all-purpose flour, and stir it together to cook for a while. Whiz together in a food processor an onion, some garlic, a peeled green apple and some mango if you have any, along with a cut-up carrot, a few inches of peeled, chopped ginger, a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste, a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce and enough chicken stock to thin everything out a little. Add this mixture to the pork, along with perhaps a little more chicken stock, and allow it to cook down for 30 minutes or so.
That's your curry. All that's left is to build your dam out of steamed rice, add the curry to the reservoir and steam some broccoli for trees in the valley below it. Kids in particular will thrill to the tableau, but adults are not immune to its charms. There's even a Japanese foundation to reference for landscape ideas.
Not for you? O.K., try Melissa Clark's recipe for baked fish and chips. Or Julia Moskin's recipe for spicy Chinese mustard chicken wings, which would pair nicely with the Rockets and (Curry-less) Warriors game. Perhaps you'd like to try David Tanis's recipe for a smoky eggplant salad with yogurt and mint. Or to take a run at Martha Rose Shulman's recipe for a spring ramen bowl with snap peas and asparagus (above). It's asparagus season, after all.
You can find other recipes to cook tonight and in coming days onCooking. Please rate them when you've cooked them, and leave notes on them if you have any to add. You can see what we're cooking on our accounts at Facebook and Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter, where we use and monitor the hashtag #NYTCooking. And if you run into problems, either with our site or apps, do not hesitate to reach out for help. We're at cookingcare@nytimes.com and will be pleased to hear from you.
Now, do read this Jenni Quilter review in The London Review of Books of a new biography of the American painter Grace Hartigan, who did not mess around. And did you see our Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jenna Wortham, Wesley Morris and Jon Caramanica talking about Beyoncé's "Lemonade" on Facebook Live? Y'oughta. See you soon.