Recipes aren't roadmaps, they're just suggestions of routes you might take when you find yourself in the kitchen. It's the detours that are most satisfying part of cooking, the paths that you find on your own.

That's why this note, from a professor at the University of Toronto, made me smile so broadly. It just came in, but I thought I'd share it with you.

Dear Ruth: I really love the Gourmet book & it is a constant resource for me now. I wanted to say that the skirt steak with black pepper recipe (I don't put that much pepper on when I make it :)) works very well with boneless, skinless chicken thighs with the leftover chicken making a great pizza (Jamie Oliver's tomato sauce with dried peppers & fresh basil, baby king mushrooms & Asiago cheese).

The grilled onions in balsamic vinegar that go with the skirt steak recipe are now a house favorite & have now found there way into green beans (a variation on Mario Batali's green beans & onions from his Multo Gusto cookbook).

FYI, here's my simplified version of Maggie Ruggiero's recipe:

Grilled London Broil with Red Onions

Stir together 4 cloves of garlic, 3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar, 1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, and 1/2 teaspoon black pepper. Add 1 1/2 pounds of London broil or skirt steak to the mixture and marinate in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours.Just before grilling bring to room temperature, remove steak from marinade, pat dry and throw the marinade out.

Peel 3 small red onions, but leam them intact and cut lengthwise into 3/4-inch-thick wedges. Insert a wooden pick horizontally through each wedge (to keep it intact while grilling), and marinate in mixture of 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, 2 tablespoons of olive oil with a bit of salt and pepper shaken in.

Grill steak about 10 to 12 minutes over a medium fire. REmove and allow to stand while you grill the onions for 6 minutes or so.

Cut steak crosswise into thin slices, holding knife at a 45-degree angle. This will serve 4 people.

Wild Blackberry Pie

The surprise of finding wild blackberries creeping along the edges of the woods is one of the great pleasures of these deep summer days. Even the mean wild vines, stretching out their vicious thorns to scratch you, cannot dim the pleasure. The purple juice stains your fingers for days, a trophy, a tattoo.

No other pie tastes quite like this one, and few are so forgiving. The most important point is to taste the berries and decide how much sugar to throw in. Some berries are large, moist, generous with sweetness while others are so small, tight and circumspect that only heat can make them sweet. Taste the berries, and then add anywhere from half a cup to a whole one for 4 to 5 cups of berries.

You can thicken this pie with anything you like; I’ve used cornstarch, instant tapioca or flour. Choose one, and use about 3 tablespoons. You can add cinnamon if you like, but I think these berries deserve to stand on their own.

Stir the sugar and the thickener into the berries, squeeze in some lemon juice and mix gently. Toss the berries into a pie crust, dot the top with butter, cover with a top crust and cut some vents. Put the pie on the bottom rack of a very hot oven (425 or so) for about 10 minutes, then turn the heat down to 375 and bake until fragrant and golden, about 45 minutes more.

Warm Peach Cobbler

This is summer, served warm on a plate. Just peeling the peaches, uncovering that color just beneath the skin, makes me happy. As does the scent of this simple cobbler as it bakes, filling the house with its golden aroma

Peel 4 large peaches, and slice them directly into a glass or ceramic pie plate, being sure to capture the juice. Squeeze half a lemon over the fruit and toss in a half cup of sugar and a tablespoon of cornstarch.

Mix a cup of flour with a teaspoon of baking powder, and a quarter teaspoon of baking soda and salt. Cut in half a stick of butter and very gently mix in a third cup of buttermilk. Plop the dough onto the fruit, shake a little sugar over the top and bake in a 400 degree oven for about half an hour.

Serve warm, with a pitcher of cream.

Fast, Easy, Satisfying: Indian Chicken

This is one of my favorite fast dinners; the most time-consuming part is pulling the skin off the chicken legs, and you can do that in about a minute. The yogurt tenderizes the meat, making it incredibly silky, and the spices penetrate it, making it sing with flavor. The high-heat of the oven gives it a few charred spots, which makes the chicken even tastier.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.

Pull the skin off 6 whole chicken legs (or a dozen thighs if you prefer).

Chop up a handful of mint and another one of cilantro, and stir them into a cup of whole-milk yogurt, along with a few good dollops of bottled vindaloo paste and some salt and pepper. If you like your food really hot, shake in some ground chile flakes too. Slather the chicken all over with this mixture, put it onto a foil-lined baking pan and roast for about half an hour.

Wonderful finger food - and terrific cold the next day.

Images from Eataly

The fish counter. Last night David Pasternak was serving oysters and crudo right across the way.

Eataly, after Hopper

The guys behind the counter were serving dried beef cured in bergamot.

Sent from my iPhone

Focaccia at Eataly

Sent from my iPhone

We need a better word for slime

Why are Americans so repelled by the texture of slime? Could it be because the word itself is so awful? What if we called it bounce instead? Would we like it better?

Years ago, in Japan, I learned to love the clean taste and mysterious texture of grated yama imo - surely one of nature's slimiest creations. When you slice this mountain potato it has the texture of jicama, but when you bite in it begins to dissolve in a wonderful fashion, slowly disintegrating beneath your teeth. Grated, it turns into something more resembling melted mozzarella than any vegetable I can think of, a kind of fresh-tasting porridge that separates into long rubbery white strings when you attempt to pick it up.

In Japan slime is much prized; if grated yama imo is good, grated yama imo with a raw quail’s egg is even better. But last night at SushiZen I had a veritable slime fest: muzuku, the beautiful feathery seaweed from Okinawa that goes shivering from your chopsticks when you try to pick it up. I love its fresh, citric flavor and buoyant texture. Last night it shimmered up at us from etched glass bowls, topped with a pure white squiggle of yama imo, a single raw quail egg and a bright green dab of grated okra.

It was lovely, and I knew I should take a picture of it. But I was so happy when it arrived that I just dived in.

Sashimi at Sushizen

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From Today's New York Times

Sunday Routine | Ruth Reichl A Day for Food (Bears Not Invited)

By ROBIN FINN

For Ruth Reichl, the saving grace in losing her decade-long job as editor in chief of Gourmet when the magazine closed last year is being able to live, write and cook virtually full time at her glassy hilltop home in Spencertown, N.Y., in Columbia County. Ms. Reichl, 62, who was the dining critic for The New York Times before joining Gourmet, is the author of four memoirs and is currently working on a cookbook and a novel. She and her husband, Michael Singer, 70, a retired news producer for CBS, have a son, Nick, 21, who attends Wesleyan University, and a 17-year-old cat, Stella, as well as an apartment on the Upper West Side.

UP WITH THE CAT I’m up by 6, because that’s when Stella gets me up and demands her breakfast. Now that I don’t have a job, we often have a bunch of visitors sleeping over on weekends, so instead of getting up and making breakfast for Michael and me, I’m making it for lots of people at all different times, depending on when they wake up. But at 6, it’s Stella and me.

MAKE COFFEE, CHECK BREAD I make some coffee, a French roast by Strongtree that I buy in Hudson, read the papers online and walk around outside by myself with Stella looking at the deer and the birds for a while until it’s time to check the bread. I bake bread nearly every day; I use Jim Lahey’s no-knead method and leave it to rise overnight. At 8, I drive to Hudson to get the Sunday papers, and by the time I’m back, around 8:45, people are getting up.

O.J., BACON, EGGS First I squeeze the orange juice and make the bacon; I get it from a restaurant in Hudson called Swoon that uses local pigs and cures the bacon right there. My eggs come from North Plain Farm. I like poached eggs, but I’ll make scrambled or fried or whatever anybody wants. I’m kind of a short-order cook in the morning from 9 until noon. There’s home-baked breads for toast. And jams. Sometimes I make scones or muffins or biscuits: Sunday is the big wonderful breakfast day.

WRITING TIME Around noon, I put the leftovers on the kitchen counter and go out to my writing studio in the woods. It’s pretty comfortable in the summer; there’s always a breeze. In the winter, it’s a different story. There’s no heat, so I have to get out there and get the wood-burning stove going before breakfast if I want it to be warm by noon. I’ll usually write for two or three hours.

LUNCH, ANYONE? Around 2:30 or 3, if anybody’s hungry, I’ll make grilled cheese sandwiches or whatever. And I put the bread in the oven. Then my treat is to sit outside and do the crossword puzzle on the lawn. After that, I’ll drive to a farm stand and pick up whatever’s fresh.

NO GARDENING I don’t have my own garden; we’re on shale and in the woods. And if I did have a garden, the deer and chipmunks and squirrels and bears would eat everything anyway. The bears can be scary; I woke up a few days ago and two of them were peering in the window.

DINNER AT SUNSET Let’s face it, my life tends to revolve around food, and I love feeding people. We try to time dinner to sunset and we eat on the porch. Corn, tomatoes, potato salad, burgers, and I’ll probably have made a pie — this summer it’s been sour cherry or apricot.

“MAD MEN” AND BED I have to watch “Mad Men” at 10 — I’ve been a fan since the beginning — and then I go to bed and read for an hour. My day’s over at midnight.