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

Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

WEDNESDAY, MAY 18, 2016

SAM SIFTON

In the newspaper game, the first sentence or two of an article is called a lede. The lede is meant to entice readers, get them to read all the way to the end of the piece. Write a good lede, and it's a good day at work. A grizzled newsroom veteran may mutter, "That's a hell of a lede."
Ian Fisher, who has served The Times as a bureau chief in East Africa and Rome, who ran our digital operations here in New York and who currently sits as our weekend editor, has a hell of a lede in the Food section this morning on a piece that tackles the joys and challenges of curing your own meat.
"Curing meat is why humans could stay put when there was nothing to grow, kill or steal," is how his article begins. "It is how conquerors and discoverers lasted while they traveled the world."
We couldn't put it down. And the recipes! Ian has ones for home-cured salmon (above), for duck prosciutto, for bacon and forguanciale. They're simple and safe and, in the case of the salmon, won't take you more than three days to prepare. It would be great if you could give one or two of them a try this week or weekend.
What? You didn't start reading The Times so you could set yourself up as a frontiersman curing sea duck breasts and wild boar against the inevitable ravages of time? That's O.K. Boys don't cry. Cooking has recipes for you as well.
Kim Severson is just back from Cuba with an article about the cuisine of deprivation. It is accompanied by a fine recipe for congrí: Cuban black beans and rice.
Or you could head in another direction entirely and make David Tanis's recipe for chicken saltimbocca. You could make this recipe for chile-crusted black sea bass, which I learned at the side of the chefKerry Heffernan one summer after catching approximately 20 million of them while trying to find a striped bass instead. You could make Mark Bittman's recipe for pasta with anchovies and arugula.
Or you could follow our Wednesday tradition and dispense with recipes entirely. Make some mushroom toast, my riff on an old Nigel Slater recipe. Take a bag of frozen organic peas and boil them for a couple of minutes to get them hot and cooked through, then put them in a food processor with a hit of olive oil, some lemon juice and, if you can find any, some tarragon leaves. Whizz that all together into a thickish purée. Then sauté a bunch of thick-sliced portobellos in a lot of butter with a little bit of garlic. Make toast from thick slices of the best bread you can find at the store, spread with the pea purée and then top with the mushrooms. Dinner!
Other ideas for what to cook tonight and in coming days are onCooking. Do yourself a favor and save the ones that are of interest to you to your recipe box. Then, you know the drill: Rate their success when you've cooked them, or leave notes on them to help others achieve success of their own. And, as always, if you run into problems, please ask for help. We're at cookingcare@nytimes.comand standing by.
Now meet Bullet the bison, who is house-trained. Have an excellent day.