Meatballs, garlic yogurt, salad

The perfect meal for weeknight dinners or party-time
Cooking
June 1, 2025
Sue Li's adana meatballs. Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Sue Li.

Adana meatballs for wherever you stay

Good morning. There's maybe no better Sunday stroll than one taken through the West Side Market in the Ohio City neighborhood of Cleveland, gathering food for a feast. You would do well with sausages — Slovenian, Italian, Midwestern brats — and a sack full of fresh cannoli, another of dried fruit, with some cheeses to cut onto fresh hard rolls. Maybe a few walleye fillets, a side of smoked whitefish? Definitely a few apple fritters, please.

And look at those ground meats, those baskets of herbs! They spur desire, a thought I can share here because you can find those ingredients yourself, wherever you stay: a mixture of beef and lamb to roll up into Turkish adana meatballs (above), excellent baked in an oven and something a little beyond that cooked on a grill.

I like the meatballs with a lemony yogurt run through with garlic, with warm pita bread and an herb salad, hot sauce on the side. It's a lovely Sunday dinner, a flame-kissed farewell to the weekend.

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Adana Meatballs

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With Sunday sorted, let's turn to the rest of the week. …

Monday

Alexa Weibel developed this intensely flavorful new recipe for crispy crumbled tofu tacos that nicely delivers on the first adjective (crispy tofu is often a lie). The avocado-lime cream that comes alongside is another revelation: a rich, tangy sauce that holds everything together. Get some cilantro on there while you're at it, and some sliced radishes.

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Armando Rafael for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Brett Regot.

Crispy Tofu Tacos

By Alexa Weibel

1 1/4 hours

Makes 8 to 10 tacos

Tuesday

I like a savory pancake for dinner, and never more than when it's Hetty Lui McKinnon's recipe for a noodle okonomiyaki. It's built on a base of ramen noodles, cabbage and seasoned eggs, and topped with a drizzle of mayonnaise. (And, if you're me, a few dabs of totally not-Japanese chile crisp.)

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Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne.

Noodle Okonomiyaki (Cabbage and Egg Pancakes)

By Hetty Lui McKinnon

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

91

50 minutes

Makes 4 servings

Wednesday

Anna Francese Gass's recipe for rigatoni alla zozzona combines the ingredients of the four pasta dishes that help define Rome: amatriciana, cacio e pepe, carbonara and gricia. It's a kitchen-sink affair ("alla zozzona" translates roughly to "a big mess"), with tomato sauce, black pepper, egg yolks, cheese, guanciale and sausage to surround the pasta tubes. So good.

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Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Victoria Granof.

Rigatoni Alla Zozzona

By Anna Francese Gass

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4,295

30 minutes

Makes 4 to 6 servings 

Thursday

Another marvel from Lex: her recipe for çilbir, a light Turkish dinner of garlicky yogurt topped with poached eggs and spicy butter, adapted from one by the cookbook author Özlem Warren. I like it with toast, to eat at the kitchen counter while watching something dumb on a screen.

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Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Çilbir (Turkish Eggs With Yogurt)

Recipe from Özlem Warren

Adapted by Alexa Weibel

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814

20 minutes

Makes 2 servings

Friday

And then you can head into the weekend with Mark Bittman's excellent recipe for soy-grilled steak, an argument for quick marination and one of the great techniques for making a decent steak into an excellent one. Grab a big bowl and mix soy sauce with a little hoisin, a lot of chopped garlic and ginger, some freshly ground black pepper and a healthy squeeze of lime juice, then slide your steak into it for the time it takes to heat your grill. Get the meat on the fire and baste it a few times as it cooks. The finished masterpiece — crusty, salty-sweet — is great with fries, but I like it best with a torn baguette slathered in salted butter.

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Craig Lee for The New York Times

Perfect Soy-Grilled Steak

By Mark Bittman

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

1,722

30 minutes

Makes 4 servings

There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this week waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Wander our digital aisles. See what you find. (You'll need a subscription to do so, of course. If you haven't taken one out yet, would you consider subscribing today? Thanks.)

If you run into issues with your account or our technology, please reach out: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Operators are standing by. Or if you'd like to squawk about something, or say something nice about my colleagues, you can write to me: hellosam@nytimes.com. I cannot respond to every letter. But I read each one I get.

Now, it's nothing to do with huckleberries, king salmon or ghee, but I've continued my travels through Jack Carr's vengeful and propulsive "Terminal List" novels and (only) if you thrill to geopolitics and operatic violence, you may want to join me.

News from the CBS affiliate in Roanoke, Va.: Metallica saved my family.

In case you missed it, I'd like to commend to you my colleague Joseph Bernstein's moving account of his father's life and death, "My Father Prosecuted History's Crimes. Then He Died in One."

Finally, here's R.E.M. to play us off, "Cuyahoga." Play that while you're cooking, and I'll be back next week.

Fresh, delicious dinner ideas for busy people, from Emily Weinstein and NYT Cooking.

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