These Eggs, Though! - The New York Times

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These Eggs, Though! - The New York Times Posted: 24 Feb 2021 07:30 AM PST Good morning. I don't like this season of "Pandemic." The writing's weak, and the plotlines keep shifting. Everything's so dark! I'm working hard to find pleasure these days: a fudgy brownie one of my kids baked, a glass of malted milk with it; hot honey shrimp; dan dan noodles. Sometimes that works. (Other times only serendipity will do: a lone cardinal sighted on top of a tree in snowy woods, singing, "cheer, cheer, cheer.") But scrambled eggs can work wonders on the darkest mood. (So does seeing a snowy owl.) J. Kenji López-Alt unveiled a new magic trick for them the other day, for extra-creamy scrambled eggs (above). The recipe appears intricate — it involves using a starch slurry and cubed butter — but if you run through it once or twice, it could become second nature and maybe your new favorite breakfast. And how about making your own spice blends? Melissa Clark made a strong argument for doing so this week, and I must say I have found great happiness in the grinding and mixing. It's meditative, and meditative is what we need just now. She offers baseline instruction for five blends: five-spice powder; baharat; garam masala; za'atar; sweet baking spice. Make them a few times, and you'll find yourself tweaking the blends to your own tastes and uses. As for dinner tonight, I offer good spirits in the form of our weekly exercise in no-recipe cooking: this time, an improvisatory take on pasta with hot Italian sausage, artichoke hearts and brown butter. Set a pot of well-salted water to boil, then sauté some sausage links in a little oil to seize their skins tight. Take them out of the pan and cut them into coins. (The water's boiling now, so get some pasta into it — I like it with cavatelli in honor of Frankies Spuntino in Brooklyn, which serves a similar dish.) Return the sausage coins to the pan with a big hunk of butter and toss them all around until everything's crisp and the butter's gone nutty. Now add a jar of artichoke hearts and toss. Drain off the pasta and put it into a warm bowl with the sauce. Mix well and serve with grated Parmesan. Turn that frown upside down. Other things to cook this week: sheet-pan Cajun salmon; soy-glazed chicken breasts with pickled cucumbers; pastelón; vegan Bolognese; baked beans; or one of these 50 recipes for one-pot meals. And there are thousands and thousands more recipes to consider waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go take a look and see what piques your interest. Save the recipes you want to cook. Rate the ones you've made. And leave notes on them, too, if you've come up with a cool hack or ingredient substitution that you want to remember or share with fellow subscribers. (Subscriptions are necessary if you want to enjoy all that NYT Cooking has to offer. They support our journalism. I hope, if you haven't already, that you will subscribe to NYT Cooking today.) We'll be standing by to help, should something go sideways in your cooking or our technology. Just write us at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Now, it's nothing to do with veal chops or Lawry's seasoned salt, but here's some newish fiction from Jhumpa Lahiri to read: "Casting Shadows," in The New Yorker. We can debate the storytelling, but I think you'll like the scenery a lot: "The Bay," a police procedural set in Lancashire, England, on the coast of Morecambe Bay. I enjoyed this Larry Wolff essay in The New York Review of Books about how gas illumination changed opera. Stick with me on this one! Finally, our pop music team has rounded up a lot of new music for you. Start with Dawn Richard, "Bussifame," and I'll be back on Friday.

Cooking With Confidence - The New York Times Posted: 27 Jan 2021 12:00 AM PST Tejal Rao has a marvelous story in The Times this week about how restaurant cooks have taken to their home kitchens — and to Instagram — to survive during the pandemic, making small-batch meals to sell to customers, pop-up restaurant style. The food's exciting, Tejal reports — "revitalizing and intimate," in her words — and a good reminder that creativity cannot be stifled by the coronavirus, that culture continues to bubble along, that art is out there always. There's a confidence to the cooks Tejal interviewed. They're proud of their craft, of the food they're selling, and it occurred to me, reading about them, that cooking can and should satisfy and delight these days, after so many months of cooking so often, of honing our skills. You don't need some towering sourdough boule to achieve that. You can just cook, simply and well, and marvel at how good it makes you and others feel. Try your hand, for example, at this chicken and mushroom juk with scallion sauce (above), clear and comforting. Or these marvelous porchetta pork chops, brawny and flavorful. Make a bowl of creamy vegan tofu noodles, or a brace of French onion grilled cheese sandwiches. You don't even need a recipe to unlock fulfillment. You can go to the market and wait for a muse. I did that and came home with a few dozen cherrystone clams. I steamed them open in just a little water, then dipped them in brown butter I had stained with sweet and fiery habanero sauce. I washed it all down with clam stock, then mopped the bowl with a heel of lard bread I had lying around. This was maybe the best thing I'd cooked in a month: pure flavor, the ingredients barely touched. You may end up feeling the same way if you make this vinegar chicken, or this kale and quinoa salad with tofu and miso. Swap in some frozen wild blueberries and you could make these muffins some morning to remind you of summer. Sweet potatoes with tahini butter? You may find yourself wondering if you could make those at scale, start a pop-up of your own, delight the neighborhood. Here's a pan-seared steak with red wine sauce you'd be happy to eat once a week at your neighborhood bistro. But you made it yourself. Here's vegetarian kofta curry. And dan dan noodles. Please make salmon burgers some time. You'll love yourself for them. There are thousands and thousands more recipes just like that waiting for you on NYT Cooking, recipes to make you feel proud. Go browse and see what you discover. Save the recipes you like. Rate the recipes you've cooked. And leave notes on them, if you've discovered something about them that you'd like to remember or alert to your fellow subscribers. Yes, you do need to be a subscriber to do all that. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. I hope, if you haven't already, that you will subscribe to NYT Cooking today. Thanks. We are here to help should something go wrong along the way. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise.

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