The pork takes three days. Worth it.

Italian week. Eight ingredients or fewer.

Southeast Asia is on the sheet pan.

The oven does what a charcoal grill in northeast Thailand would.

Put the pork in the brine tonight.

Cider-brined pork loin, wild rice soup, chili with skillet cornbread.

Mexican table, one bird all week

Pollo asado Sunday, tortilla soup Tuesday, tacos Monday in between.

Sunday afternoon, a chuck roast, and three hours of nothing.

The braise feeds Sunday, Tuesday, and the freezer.

Vietnam and Thailand for a whole week. The caramel goes in Sunday.

Three jars in the fridge Sunday night carry four dinners.

Mid-September. The carnitas goes in Sunday and carries three dinners.

Brown butter Monday. Buttermilk brine Thursday. The oven earns its keep.

Labor Day Monday. Smash burgers. Glenda gets the first one off the pan.

The fennel pasta Tuesday is the first taste of what's coming. From here through October the cooking gets slower, richer, more oven-forward.

Last week of August. Two things go in the oven Sunday and neither of them is dinner.

Slow-roasted tomatoes and corn stock. Forty-five minutes of work, three hours of the oven doing it alone, and then it's September.

We're going back to Mexico this week, and we're doing it without a single tortilla.

Pozole, albóndigas, chiles rellenos. The cooking that had to stand up without anything to hide behind.

New country this week. Cut the backbone out. It's easier than it sounds.

Thirteen weeks in, you've cooked Mexican, Italian, Southeast Asian, and American. This week we go somewhere you haven't been.

The corn is at the point where you can eat a kernel raw off the cob and understand it.

Five dinners, each standing on its own. Wednesday is the week's project and the reason I wrote the week the way I did.

Four nights, four cuisines, one set of leftovers that becomes a fifth dinner

The cast iron and Dutch oven do most of the work. Every dish lands between 25 and 45 minutes.

Last week of July — and it closes with a peach glaze you built from scratch

Not harder cooking. Just fewer crutches. The jar of sauce, the bottle of dressing — one at a time, you stop needing them.

Italian this week — a pot of July tomato sauce you can only make right now

Make extra and freeze a container. In February you'll be glad.

This week goes east — and a little jar of nuoc cham comes with it

Once you've made it once you'll keep it in the door of the fridge all summer.

Anaheim in July means the tomatillos are stacked high and cost almost nothing.

One pot of tinga on Monday turns into tacos, a bowl, and fried rice. Four dinners from one Sunday.