I don't cook from recipes as often as you'd think, given how much of my life revolves around food. When I'm traveling I'm eating other people's cooking, and when I'm home I'm usually trying to reverse-engineer whatever I ate somewhere else, badly. But Sheela Prakash's latest batch of recipes for The New York Times stopped my scroll this week, mostly because all three dishes sound like things I've actually eaten and loved in places far from my kitchen.

The lineup: shrimp peperonata, chicken with spicy corn, and Korean barbecue-style meatballs. Peperonata, if you haven't spent a week in Sicily eating it on stale bread for breakfast like a certain someone, is basically peppers and onions cooked down slowly in olive oil until they collapse into something sweet and silky. Pairing it with shrimp makes sense to me. The sauce does all the work and the shrimp just need two minutes, which means dinner comes together without you standing over the stove negotiating with your own hunger.

Chicken with spicy corn is peak September cooking in my opinion. Corn is still sweet at the markets right now, and the window where it's actually good is closing fast. Adding heat to sweet corn is one of those tricks that feels obvious once you taste it, like the elote I've eaten standing on too many street corners to count. You get sugar, char, and then a little burn at the back of your throat, and honestly it works every time.

And the KBBQ meatballs. Ground meat glazed in something sweet-savory with garlic and sesame is such a reliable weeknight formula that I'm surprised it took this long to become a trend. Think bulgogi energy without the marinade patience. Gochujang has been creeping into everything lately, which lines up with what I keep saying: the condiment aisle tells you where food goes next, and gochujang is next in line for the full sriracha-style takeover.

What I appreciate about Prakash's recipes generally is that they assume you're a normal person with a normal kitchen and a normal Wednesday. No ingredients that require a specialty store pilgrimage, no technique that needs a tutorial. This trio especially reads like a season-transition menu, the kind of cooking that bridges the last of the summer produce and the first instinct to make something cozy.

My plan is to make the shrimp peperonata first and eat it with a lot of crusty bread, the way I did in a little town outside Catania where the owner of the guesthouse laughed at how much bread I went through. Some things you don't unlearn.

If you make any of these, tell me which one. I'm taking votes on whether the meatballs beat the shrimp, and I already know I'm going to be wrong about my own pick.