What to Cook This Weekend - The New York Times

What to Cook This Weekend - The New York Times
These Recipes Are So Smart - The New York Times
17 Cooking Tips Our Food Staff Swears By - The New York Times

Posted: 29 Jan 2021 07:30 AM PST

Good morning. We're deep in winter on the East Coast of the United States, starting and finishing our days in darkness, frost on the windowpanes, salty grit at the doorstep. It'd be nice to have a roaring fire this weekend, at some giant pile of a house like something out a John Irving novel, sit on a couch in front of it for a while, then head into the huge kitchen to make dinner: a fresh ham; baked beans; mashed parsnips; a honking big double apple pie.

Good on you if that's possible. For most of us, it's not. It's just another weekend in the same place we've been for months and months, working or looking for work, schooling or struggling with schooling, living or just approximating living, day after day. Saturday, Sunday? For some of us, they may as well be Tuesday or Thursday.

Fight that feeling, please. If you're off the next two days from whatever it is you do during the week, see if you can't bring some cheery big-house energy into your place of residence, however small and cramped and familiar it has come to feel.

Bake a mushroom lasagna (above), with a tart Italian salad and a peach cobbler for dessert. (Use canned peaches. We are living through a pandemic. It's fine.) Make braised lamb with celery root purée. Assemble a blackout cake. Set up some gravlax for next weekend. Make yourself useful to yourself and to those who eat your food.

Embrace projects: fresh pasta dough for tagliatelle with prosciutto and butter, say, or saffron honey marshmallows, some Spicy Big Tray Chicken. Use the weekend to give yourself a proper break from the strain or monotony of the week that was, to lose yourself in a recipe, to offer yourself the chance to experience a delicious joy.

Or, you know, watch television instead. The 25th Winter X Games competition gets underway today in Aspen, Colo., and if this year is going to look very different from the preceding ones on account of the coronavirus, I'm still hoping it leads to a lot of amplitude on the screen and excitement on the couch. We have loads and loads of excellent recipes for chicken wings, anyway!

Thousands and thousands more recipes to fill the weekend await you on NYT Cooking. Stroll our digital aisles and see what you discover. You can and ought to save the recipes you like. Please rate the recipes you've cooked. And do leave notes on them if you've come up with a recipe hack or ingredient substitution that you'd like to remember or share with others.

You need to be a subscriber to do that, of course. Subscriptions support the work of the dozens of people who make the site and app possible. If you haven't already, I hope that you will subscribe to NYT Cooking today. Thank you.

And please reach out to us for help if you run into trouble with anything along the way. We're at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise.

Now, it's nothing to do with corn pone or belly lox, but I spent 15 minutes the other day watching a red-tailed hawk hunt a low salt marsh for rabbits, so Tiana Clark's new poem in The Atlantic, "I Stare at a Cormorant," really resonated. Birds are there, and then they're not. They're not going to save us.

Of course you should read Keziah Weir on Billie Eilish in Vanity Fair, but what really set me back was the fact that it's the cover story for the March issue of the magazine. March! We've been dealing with this virus for a very long time. (So long, in fact, that you may wish to start planning your summer garden and avail yourself of Modern Farmer's new guide to buying seeds.)

Here's James Booker, "Junco Partner," live in 1978.

Finally, it's coming up on 20 years since Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Definitely time to reread it if you've read it, and past time to read it if you haven't. To the weekend! I'll see you on Sunday.

These Recipes Are So Smart - The New York Times

Posted: 29 Jan 2021 09:30 AM PST

Hello and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes, a newsletter for busy people who still want something good to eat.

As a home cook and an editor, I love and seek out recipes that are animated by a great idea: a clever technique, a sharp shortcut that defies conventional wisdom, a magic combination of flavors or textures, or an ingredient moonlighting in a new context. Those are the recipes I try to give you in every newsletter, and this week's is really chock-full of them. Cacio e pepe — but made with farro, and using a technique that is easier than the classic. Chicken adobo — but made with cauliflower, which also turns it vegan.

On another note, last week I asked how the weather was where you are, and what you're cooking, as food and weather are inherently entwined. It was wonderful and fascinating to read your emails. (The farthest came from a town outside Berlin, where it was about to snow and the writer had just cooked chopped cauliflower al dente and used it in a salad with smoked salmon and mustard vinaigrette. Ooh!) Keep sending them, or just reach out with your cooking quandaries. I read every note: dearemily@nytimes.com.

[Sign up here to receive the Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter in your inbox every Friday.]

Here are five dishes for the week:

1. Farro e Pepe

Traditional cacio e pepe is simple but finicky to make. Samin Nosrat changes that by using an immersion blender to make the sauce here, a foolproof technique she found in a YouTube video featuring the Roman chef Flavio de Maio. Samin pairs the sauce with farro, for a consistency that she likens to risotto, but you could use it on pasta. If you don't have an immersion blender, use a food processor.

View this recipe.

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2. Broiled Fish With Lemon Curry Butter

Melissa Clark takes the reliable combination of broiled fish and butter and spikes that butter with garlic, ginger and curry powder. The results are abundantly more flavorful, with next to zero extra effort on your part. I'd want potatoes alongside, but if you make rice, you can cook extra to reheat and serve with the cheese buldak or cauliflower adobo below. (Not as good as freshly made rice, but definitely good enough and saves you a pot to clean.)

View this recipe.

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3. Maangchi's Cheese Buldak (Fire Chicken)

Cheese buldak takes chicken braised in a sauce made with spicy gochujang and gochugaru, staples in Korean cooking, then covers it with shredded mozzarella. (The origins of the dish likely have something to do with the arrival of pizza chains like Domino's in South Korea, and with them a mountain of low-moisture mozzarella.) This recipe comes from Maangchi, the YouTube star and cookbook author, and it's really easy to make.

4. Cauliflower Adobo

I made this recipe by Ali Slagle for dinner on Wednesday and was delighted anew by how smart and simple it is: a vegan take on chicken adobo that comes together within 45 minutes, but keeps the delicious flavors of the Filipino classic. We had it with rice, and next time I'll fry an egg to serve on top, too (which, of course, makes the dish not vegan).

View this recipe.

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17 Cooking Tips Our Food Staff Swears By - The New York Times

Posted: 29 Jan 2021 09:02 AM PST

Make It Room Temperature

If a baking recipe specifies room-temperature ingredients, there is a reason: Chemistry! The temperature of your ingredients plays a very big role in the final outcome. I, for one, rarely have the forethought to take my ingredients out of the fridge ahead of time. An easy way to bring your eggs up to temperature is to fill a bowl with lukewarm water and submerge the eggs for about 1 or 2 minutes. VAUGHN VREELAND

Use a Garbage Bowl

When I'm cooking, I keep one large bowl for food scraps nearby. It keeps the prep cleaner and eliminates a back and forth to the trash or compost. KIM GOUGENHEIM

Put Chopsticks to Work

Chopsticks are among the most versatile tools in the kitchen. They're great for turning greens to coat evenly with salad dressing, tossing noodles or pasta with sauce, plucking deep-fried treats out of oil or boiled dumplings out of water, beating eggs for scrambles or omelets, and flipping roasted vegetables on a sheet pan. With baking, they fill the tool gap between whisk and wooden spoon, incorporating wet ingredients into dry without over- or undermixing. GENEVIEVE KO

Start Garlic in Cold Oil

I wish I could remember who taught me to start garlic in cold oil. Whenever my first step is to fry garlic, I put the garlic and oil into a cold pan and then turn on the heat, so the fry is gentle, slow and even. The garlic and oil heat up together, so the garlic doesn't immediately singe on the edges because the oil got too hot, or start to color too quickly. TEJAL RAO

Mind Your Dish Towel

Always keep a few dish towels on hand, neatly folded, to wipe down the stove as you cook, to help clean off cutting boards, to dry knives you've washed after cutting the chicken, before slicing the ginger. SAM SIFTON

Always place a dish towel under your cutting board. It'll keep the board from slipping as you chop or cut. KRYSTEN CHAMBROT

Regulate Your Oven

Store a pizza stone on the bottom rack of your oven. The hot stone works as a buffer between the oven's heat source and the food, which helps regulate the temperature of a fussy or uneven oven. It also helps the oven return to temperature faster when you open and close the door. SCOTT LOITSCH

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