Beyond Recipes

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Christopher Simpson for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Beyond Recipes

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Remember when there were handshakes and hugs, crowded delis at lunchtime, crowded elevators at the mall, crowded rest stops on the interstates, close-quartered Elmos in the Elmo pens of Times Square? That was back in the before times, when you could do things like pop out for the turmeric you forgot to buy for the recipes you wanted to cook, when you could pick up some duck legs on the way home from work on a whim, when you could drive somewhere out of your way just to get sauerkraut, lamb, pea shoots, bread. No more! Social distancing means shopping less or at any rate less frequently. It means your ingredients are your ingredients. There’s no following recipes strictly now.

This is most excellent news for your cooking. I may hawk recipes for a living, but I think it’s true. There are rules to follow, of course: how to roast or steam or fry; how ingredients interact. But when recipes become a prompt instead of a list of instructions, your pathways to the delicious increase in width and number. So does your confidence in the kitchen. Can’t make X because you don’t have Y? What might you use instead? How might you do it instead? Build the hack. Revel in your success.

The children wanted Chinese takeout, but there was no takeout to be had. There was cauliflower, though, and I remembered a cool version of Buffalo chicken wings my pal Derr makes: roasting the florets in a hot oven, then tossing them in butter and hot sauce. So while my cauliflower was roasting, I made a sauce of minced garlic and ginger sautéed in a little oil, a lot of ketchup, some soy sauce and oyster sauce, a lot of hot sauce. I let that cook down, turn dark and sticky. And when the florets were crisp-soft, dark brown in spots, I tossed them in the sauce and returned them to the oven to caramelize. We ate that pile of awesome with fried rice. It was excellent and helped banish all thoughts of the failed sourdough boule I’d made earlier in the day. (Rule, not recipe: The starter must be flourishing!)

Recipes to riff on this week, as we head into Ramadan’s fasts and break-fasts: roasted tomato and white bean stew (above); vegetarian carbonara with spinach; portobello patty melts.

Alternatively, Sara Bonisteel brought us this terrific fancy-ish weeknight one-pot chicken with rice from the chef Asha Gomez. Kiera Wright-Ruiz brought us this terrific musubi recipe from Alana Kysar, which you can deploy to use up the can of Spam you maybe stress-bought at the start of the pandemic. And I’ll suggest fish tacos, as well, and David Tanis’s fast pasta with garlic, anchovy, capers and red pepper. (I might have to make that with fish sauce and olives, because I used up all the capers on my favorite Toni Tipton-Martin recipe.)

We have hundreds and hundreds more recipes for you to consider this week waiting on NYT Cooking. Many more than usual are free to use even if you haven’t yet taken out a subscription to our site and apps. (Naturally, we’d be happy if you did become a subscriber, though, to support our work.)

You can visit us on Instagram as well, and on Facebook, where we have a lively community group bustling along, talking about cooking. We are on YouTube, as well, and on Twitter. And you can write us for help if anything goes wrong with your cooking or our technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, it has nothing to do with pickled ramps or Cornish game hens, but I read this Janet Evanovich potboiler, “The Scam,” and even with “Sneaky Pete” out there I think it’d be a good streaming series. It’d all be iPhone one-shots, to make it now, but still!

Wayback machine: Here’s Anne Carson interviewed by Will Aitken in the Paris Review in 2004, “The Art of Poetry.”

Bill Buford on making omelets is great, and, because it’s in The New Yorker, it’s spelled “omelette.”

My pals at the Morning Briefing turned me on to the joys of the Duluth Harbor Cam in Minnesota the other day, and now I’m hooked. Watch big ships come and go? I’m in.

Finally, do spend some time with Fiona Apple’s “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” her first album since 2012. And I’ll be back on Friday.