Good morning! Today we have for you:
I make pie all year round, but summer is when I crave it most. There’s so much fresh fruit to play with — all those tangy berries and juicy stone fruits just waiting to be wrapped in dough and baked until bubbling.
My pies are never perfect; the crusts are prone to sagging, the fillings, to erupting. But no matter how imperfect they may look, an honest fruit pie made with good ingredients and care is just about the most delicious summer dessert there is.
I’m eyeing Genevieve Ko’s brilliant new recipe for rhubarb and roasted strawberry pie for the next time I bake. To keep the strawberries from collapsing in the pie crust, she roasts them first, which makes them jammy and intense. Then she tosses them with raw rhubarb and bakes the fruit in a homemade crust with butter for flavor and shortening for flakiness. Add a scoop of vanilla ice cream and let it mingle with the red juices as it melts, turning the prettiest shade of pink.
Featured Recipe
Rhubarb and Roasted Strawberry Pie
Also on the menu
Pan-seared fish with citrus pesto: One of the easiest and quickest ways to cook fish is to cut meaty fillets like arctic char or striped bass into pieces and sauté them hot and fast, so the edges sear while the insides stay juicy and soft. Ali Slagle likes to pair them a cheeseless, citrus-scented pesto, which adds an intense garlicky-herbal perfume.
Spicy corn and shishito salad: Lidey Heuck combines sautéed peppers and crunchy raw corn kernels in this hearty, cumin-forward salad. It goes perfectly with seared fish, and is substantial enough to be a light meal all by itself, maybe with some warmed flatbreads on the side.
Roasted eggplant noodles with cashew sauce: In this lively, creamy and multitextured dish, Kay Chun roasts chickpeas and cubed eggplant until deeply caramelized, and then tosses them with springy rice noodles, cashew butter, sesame seeds and ponzu. Be sure to use roasted cashew butter, which has a richer flavor than the raw version.
Reading and eating
I’ve spent the last few weeks listening to “Anna Karenina” during my slow jogs through Prospect Park, following the parallel romantic paths of Anna and Vronsky and Kitty and Levin (nightmare double date). Tolstoy doesn’t often specify what his characters eat, but there are a few vivid exceptions: the dozens of oysters devoured by Levin and Oblonsky to preface an extravagant meal; the beefsteak Vronsky consumes “to stay slim.” There’s a quietly pivotal basketful of foraged mushrooms, and many loaves of bread and hunks of cheese eaten in various fields and woods. But the scene I find myself thinking about most right now, at the start of berry season, involves a ferocious debate about whether one does or does not add water when cooking preserves.
I’ll side with Kitty on this one and nix the water — and so apparently will Melissa Knific. Her strawberry jam calls for just strawberries, lemon juice and sugar, letting the fruit’s moisture turn the sugar into syrup with no dilution at all.
Are you a fan of audiobooks? Or Tolstoy? Or homemade jam? All of the above? Let me know at hellomelissa@nytimes.com. I am always happy to hear from you.
