This is a recap of the most recent episode of HBO’s House of the Dragon. It contains spoilers. That’s what a recap is. 

Credits! As you’d expect, last week’s Battle of the Gullet earns some new thread in the Die, You! Tapestry — there’s Sharako and Corlys goin’ at it. And there’s poor dead Jacaerys, looking for all the world like your gramma’s tomato pincushion. (I’ve only just realized that when you see blood pooling around a figure in the tapestry, it means they’re dead. Both Sharako and Jacaerys get scarlet blooms — but not Corlys. Hunh.)

We open on the smoking aftermath of the sea-battle, and then we see Rhaena, whose attempt to help Team Black turned into a big ol’ whoopsiedoodle, tearing away on Sheepstealer looking well and truly freaked. (To be clear, Rhaena’s the one who looks freaked; Sheepstealer’s just like, “Welp, my work is done here. Gotta be hitchin’ a ride on the wiiiiind.”)

They don’t close-caption a character’s internal monologue, but from the expression on her face, Rhaena’s would read something along the lines of “Ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap.”

Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell).

Theo Whiteman/HBO

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On Dragonstone, the dragonkeepers receive Jacaerys’ corpse and sort of crowd-surf it into the castle like he’s Peter Gabriel during “Lay Your Hands On Me.” Sir Lorent Marbrand, Rhaenyra’s less-than-loyal royal guard, asks a shaken Baela: “The battle?” to which she responds, shakily, “T’is won.”

Which is helpful to know, because from where I’m sitting it looked like a pretty unilateral, omnidirectional clustermess.

If you thought the creators of the show were gonna spare us seeing Rhaenyra’s reaction to Jacaerys’ death (and duly supply Emma D’Arcy with their Emmy clip in the process), you were much mistaken. It’s pretty wrenching stuff. And speaking of wrenching: When Ser Lorent attempts to pull Rhaenyra away from her son’s body, she wrenches out of his grip and turns on him, along with the rest of her Small Council, which has shrunk to just two dudes so now must technically be referred to as her Tiny Council.

Sunday Puzzle

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On-air challenge

Today’s theme is “hot.” Every answer is a familiar two-word phrase in which the first word starts HO- and the second word starts with T-.

Ex. Rowdy bar with country music, in slang –> HONKY TONK
1. Guided walkthrough of a property
2. Any member of the N.H.L.
3. Lone Star State metropolis that’s the fourth-largest city in the U.S.
4. Like an animal with its four legs bound (hyph.)
5. Instruction manual (hyph.)
6. A little pompous and arrogant, informally (hyph.)
7. Punny greeting from a magician
8. Someone who steals animals from a stable
9. Congestion that drivers encounter around July 4th, say
10. Acquisition of a company against its will.
11. Exclamation for “wow!” on TV’s “Batman”

Last week’s challenge

Last week’s challenge comes from Evan Kalish, of Bayside, N.Y. Take the name of a nocturnal creature, in two words. The first word is a spooky sound. Move the last letter of the first word to the start of the second word and you’ll get another spooky, nocturnal sound. What is the creature and what are the sounds?

Answer: Screech owl –> howl

Winner

Dan Sadoff of St. Paul, Minnesota

This week’s challenge

This week’s challenge comes from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.

On a recent weeknight, I opened up my fridge and found an assortment of half-eaten or ignored food.

That included takeout that I didn’t find appetizing enough to eat for lunch. A rotisserie chicken with most of the meat picked off. A couple of raw vegetables from the farmers market that were starting to wilt.

“There’s nothing to eat,” I told myself. Yet even I knew that was ridiculous. There was plenty of food in my fridge. I just didn’t feel inspired to cook with it.

So I asked some chefs for guidance. How could I more consistently use leftovers and the other ingredients I tend to overlook?

Start with a mindset shift, says Margaret Li, chef and co-author of the cookbook Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Think about cooking with leftovers as a creative, experimental exercise, not a guilt-driven one.

“It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle, and then you get to eat it,” she says.

There are other good reasons to use up your food scraps. Nationally, about a quarter of food products go to waste, according to the nonprofit ReFED. In my own household, where we spend about $200 a week on groceries, that means I might be throwing out the equivalent of $50 of food — an unnecessary burden on my wallet, not to mention the environment.

The chefs I spoke to had some practical tips about using up more of the food we buy. Here are a few that I put to the test.

Find your “hero recipes”

Build up an arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about any ingredient. Li calls them “hero recipes.”

I tried one of these from her cookbook, called “Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry.” (Scroll down for the recipe.) It includes loose ingredients like “1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables” or “4 cups leafy greens.”

In the spirit of the recipe, I pulled vegetables out of my fridge at random and did not measure them out. The sauce was a simple mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and water. By the time I topped my bowl with chopped scallions, the dish looked like a gourmet meal, not an afterthought.