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What to Cook

Tamarind Now!

Pork chops with tamarind and ginger.Credit...Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Sam Sifton emails readers of Cooking five days a week to talk about food and suggest recipes. That email also appears here. To receive it in your inbox, register here.

Good morning. Melissa Clark has a new recipe for pork chops with tamarind and ginger that I want to get on your radar right now at the top of the week, so you have time to get some tamarind paste at the market – by which I mean, probably, the digital marketplace that’s sitting a few clicks away on your phone. Tamarind paste is awesome: sweet, tart and sour in equal measure, the pulp of the tamarind fruit (also, weirdly, a legume), and common in the cooking of South Asia and the Caribbean.

Order a jar of the stuff just as soon as you’ve finished slobbering over Melissa’s recipe, and it’ll be at your door within a few days for around the price of a sandwich at a reasonable deli. You need only a tablespoon for the pork (and if you don’t want to order any, you can always just swap in some lime juice), but having it in the fridge opens up many delicious possibilities for the next few weeks.

You could make Kim Severson’s recipe for tamarind shrimp with coconut milk. Or Mark Bittman’s recipe for pad Thai. Melissa uses it in her recipe for tamarind spiced nuts with mint. Nigella Lawson uses it in her recipe for sweet potato and chickpea curry. And you could definitely stir some into the sauce I use for Trini-Chinese chicken, if you’d like to take that dish (or really any recipe for barbecued chicken) in a new direction. Use tamarind paste once, and you’ll use it a lot. Having it in your summer larder qualifies, I think, as a very good idea.

David Tanis has a cool new recipe to try as well, for savory spiced carrot cake. That could be a cool thing to eat this week. Or you could slough off all the mixing bowls and such and go in another direction entirely, choosing a few meals from our collection of recipes for one-pot dinners. That collection defines truth in advertising: “Because the Dishwasher Is You.”

I might make cheese enchiladas with chili gravy some night soon. I like that dish accompanied by a few San Antonio margaritas, the recipe for which I learned from the elegant hostess Josie Davidson, who served them to me on her porch overlooking the San Antonio River. (One’s not enough. Three’s too many. Be careful.)

Definitely I’ll be making Mark’s recipe for pasta with sardines, bread crumbs and capers this week. Emily Weinstein, one of the editors here, came in raving about it the other morning, and I’d be – we’d all be – wise to heed her enthusiasm. She has an eye for the classics.

And will I ask a child in my house, off from school for the summer and a few months’ shy of working papers, to make peanut butter cookies so we have a dessert to eat after I make David’s recipe for pizza with sweet and hot peppers for dinner one night this week? I will. You ought to, too, if there’s free labor around you. And if anyone calls it too easy, you might print out Melissa’s recipe for fruit galette, leave it on the counter with a note on top: MAKE THIS. It’s grand.

Some 18,000 more recipes you could consider this week are available to you on Cooking. Go browse among them. Save the recipes you like to your recipe box, so you can find them later. And then cook them, rate them, leave notes on them, share them with family and friends. The point is simply to cook, and in doing so to realize the powerful force that cooking can exert on those who surround you, bringing them closer, and making them happy.

If you yourself are not happy, if you find yourself up a creek and without a paddle, either with a recipe or with our site or apps, you can reach out to our care team for help. They monitor the inbox at cookingcare@nytimes.com. So do I. We’ll get back to you with aid.

Now, maybe you could take a look at Colin Harrison’s noir-ish new novel, “You Belong to Me,” on my behalf? Harrison’s characters have sometimes left me feeling creepy and unsettled, as if I’m in the presence of moral corruption that isn’t so much evil as human, and therefore harder to stomach. I know I’ll read the book. I just want you to read it first! See you on Wednesday.

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