Some weeks you need a full project in the kitchen. A Sunday ragu that stays on the stove until the whole apartment smells like your grandmother's house, and my grandmother's house was the kind of place where the sauce went on in the morning and you did not touch it until afternoon. I grew up believing that was just how cooking worked. And then some weeks you need three smart recipes that get dinner on the table without sacrificing a single ounce of flavor. This New York Times collection is firmly in that second category, and every piece of it works.

The headline recipe is shawarma-spiced grilled chicken, and this is the one I want you to pay attention to. Shawarma, proper shawarma, is a vertical spit situation that turns for hours, the fat basting the meat until the edges go crisp and dark and almost candy-like. It is very hard to truly reproduce that at home. What you can do is borrow the spice architecture, that warm blend of aromatics that defines shawarma cooking across the Middle East, and let it do the heavy lifting on a hot grill. The marinade does the work. You just need patience enough to let the chicken sit in it.

Then there is the tapenade pasta salad, and I have feelings about pasta salad. Too many of them in this country are sad, cold things, drowning in mayonnaise, tasting of nothing, sitting next to a burger at a cookout and apologizing for existing. A pasta salad with tapenade in it, though, that is a different animal. In general, tapenade is olives, capers, garlic, good olive oil, pounded together into this dark, salty, briny paste that should cling to every curve of the pasta. This is Mediterranean cooking at its best. It is what happens when you let a few bold ingredients do the talking instead of piling on twenty mild ones.

And for dessert, broiled peaches with feta. Now, this is where some people will get nervous. Cheese and fruit together is older than almost any cooking tradition I can name. My grandmother used to eat cantaloupe with prosciutto in August and she did not need anyone's permission. Peaches and feta together, the salt cutting through all that sweetness, that is a combination I respect deeply. I trust the instinct behind it completely.

There is also apparently a technique for fried eggs in here that the Times is calling genius. I have not tested it yet, but I am always skeptical when someone claims to have reinvented the fried egg. My skepticism is not cynicism, it is just that I have cracked many thousands of eggs in my life and the best technique I know is butter, moderate heat, and patience. But I will try it. I will try anything once. Good cooking is staying open even when you think you already know the answer.

What I like about all three of these recipes together is that they feel accessible. Chicken on the grill, pasta with punchy flavors, peaches and cheese for dessert. Make the chicken tonight. Make the pasta for lunch tomorrow. Broil the peaches when the sun goes down and the kitchen finally cools off.