The Winter Solstice Approaches

Good morning. I’m not sure why homemade yogurt (above) didn’t take off this year the way sourdough bread did, the way kombucha kind of did. As Melissa Clark demonstrates , it’s so simple to make, “and the payback is huge: a pot of tangy, silky yogurt made with ingredients you can control and personalized to your tastes.”

You’ll use the stuff at breakfast, maybe, to eat with fruit preserves, with granola , with cold, segmented orange slices. And again at dinner, to accompany your chicken curry or sweet potatoes with cilantro-chile sauce . You’ll eat it with Cheerios sometimes, stir it with beets, garlic and dill . Once you start with the yogurt, you’ll find it hard to stop. (Don’t eat dairy? Make yogurt with nut milk instead.)

So start. Make yogurt on the stovetop while you’ve got these sheet-pan sausage meatballs with tomatoes and broccoli going in the oven.

Tomorrow, you can serve some on the side with this awesome slow-roasted salmon with whole lemon dressing . And you’ll be off to the races.

Later this week, I’d like to make Millie Peartree’s new recipe for that classic of the Jamaican restaurant diaspora, Rasta pasta . (Might sub in chicken thighs in place of the breasts she uses. As for the jerk seasoning, I generally use one that’s made by Walkerswood in Jamaica, and distributed widely in the United States.)

I’d also like to make chapli burgers . And the lox bowl from Shalom Japan. And always and forever this crispy lamb with cumin, scallions and loads of red peppers .

Will I get to all of them? No. But I’ll try my best, which is all I ask of anyone these days. We’ve been at this a long time, with the pandemic and the cooking every day. Just showing up to think about what you might cook for yourself and those around you is a win. And we’re here to help.

There are many, many thousands of recipes to consider awaiting you on NYT Cooking . Go browse our digital aisles and see what makes you hungry. You can save the recipes you want to cook. You ought to rate the ones you’ve made. You can leave notes on them, too, if you want to remember when you flipped the fillet, or if you want to tell your fellow subscribers how you used anchovies instead of fish sauce and how brilliantly that worked out.

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Now, it’s a fair distance from egg washes and the scent of bergamot, but Eliza Brooke is in The Times with a story about ambience rooms on YouTube — soothing, animated, hourslong videos of what amounts to contentless content. They’re a vibe. Here’s “ Library Room ASMR Ambience ” to get you started.

More writing about digital culture: Catherine Shoard in The Guardian, on the madcap world of chain reaction videos .

Britain does not like beans on Weetabix for breakfast.

Finally, on this day in 1983, Frank Rich attended the opening of the Broadway play “Moose Murders” at the Eugene O’Neill Theater. His withering review in the next day’s Times remains one of the great pans in Broadway history. Read that and I’ll be back on Wednesday.

Source : food