What to Cook This Weekend

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Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini.

Friday, March 27, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Thank goodness it’s Friday, though what is a weekend, anyway, when you’re just going to be in the same place you’ve been all week? That’s what the homebound may be thinking, anyway, after five days of office work in the living room, the bedroom, the finished basement or kitchen table. Many of us have been cooking like mad, to keep from going mad. That’s a comfort to some, but not all. “Please, God,” wrote The Atlantic staff writer Olga Khazan on Twitter the other day, “someone do a sport so my boyfriend will stop talking about his sourdough starter.”

Here’s what I think about the coming couple of days. If you can, get off your laptop, your tablet, your desktop, your phone. Keep that social distancing going, but see if you can’t get outside for a long, brisk walk — I’ve taken the weirdo route and departed at 5 a.m., to take in the sunrise in mild sweatiness and wonder. Then, yes, cook. Project recipes, on the weekend, are particularly fine.

I like, for instance, Samantha Seneviratne’s elegant peach focaccia with thyme (above), which, if you dry the segments carefully with a towel, can certainly be made with canned peaches, and a sprinkle of dried thyme instead of the fresh.

You could make no-knead dinner rolls, to mop up the sauce on this fine dinner of braised chicken legs.

On which subject, you’re not still throwing out your bones when you’re done with dinner, are you? Or the fats that come off your meats when you braise? You ought to save these things now, for they will lead to delicious rewards. Make the bones into stock: chicken, beef, lamb, pork, turkey, duck, fish. Just add water, a stalk of celery if you have one, that onion that doesn’t look very good, and let it all bubble away. This liquid will improve your dishes down the line. And that fat you peeled off the top of the oxtails or pork shoulder or whatever you braised? Put that gelatinous stuff in a bowl and keep it covered in the fridge. Toss potatoes with a couple of tablespoons before roasting or use the stuff to sauté greens.

A classic of the moment, to my mind: Julia Moskin’s recipe for sausage and cabbage, adapted from one she picked up from the British cookbook author Tamasin Day-Lewis. Likewise tofu with peanut-ginger sauce. Likewise baked potatoes or, if you’re flush with ingredients, twice-baked potatoes with cauliflower and cheese.

A sour-cream coffee cake would be nice this weekend, warmed in a toaster oven when you’re back from your early morning walk or midnight ramble. You can imagine yourself a detective in a Scandinavian mystery novel, perplexed at the darkness of the world.

Ginger-cauliflower soup? Grains and beans? An almond cake? There are hundreds and hundreds of recipes waiting for you on NYT Cooking. A lot more of them than usual are free to read even if you haven’t yet subscribed to our site and apps. (Of course, we’d be pleased if you did subscribe, to support our work.)

There’s a lot going on in our Instagram feed, and we’re posting news about restaurants, recipes, food and wine on our Twitter account. There are heaps of videos to watch on our YouTube channel. You can, as always, get help with your account or your cooking at cookingcare@nytimes.com. And we’re enjoying all the dispatches from fellow cooks on our community group on Facebook. Like and subscribe.

Now, it may not be true in your home and it’s hopefully not true on your streets, but it does ring true for my thoughts these days, and maybe yours, too: “Everything Is Jumpin’,” from Artie Shaw.

The first season of Julia Child’s “The French Chef” is free to stream on Amazon Prime.

Here’s Grub Street’s Kaitlin Menza, self-quarantined with a Michelin-starred chef.

And Constance Grady in Vox, reading deep into M.F.K. Fisher in this difficult time.

Finally, some personal news. I got a new job. I’m now an assistant managing editor of The Times, overseeing our culture and lifestyle sections, including our beloved Food and NYT Cooking. So, I’ll still be in your inbox! But if you want to get a sense of the breadth of The Times’s coverage of a cultured life in the time of the coronavirus, click on through to “At Home” and get started. I hope you’ll enjoy. See you on Sunday.