Cook Anyway

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Mark Bittman's one-pot pasta with chicken and mushrooms.

Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Michelle Gatton.

Monday, April 27, 2020

Cook Anyway

Sam Sifton

Good morning. One of the greatest first lines of a novel, ever: “One evening, it was toward the end of October, Harry Arno said to the woman he’d been seeing on and off the past few years, ‘I’ve made a decision. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before in my life.’ ”

That’s Elmore Leonard, in “Pronto,” from 2003. (Of course it is. What a writer he was!) I thought of it because I’ve been coming around to just that sort of decision myself. And here it is: I’m kind of sick of cooking. Not every day, and not all of any day, but sometimes lately, yes, for a moment or two, cooking is a drag. There’s the tyranny of it, for one thing: three squares for four people, same as yesterday, same as tomorrow.

Maybe that’s true for you, too — this occasional malaise about performing a task that, ordinarily, you love so much? It’s understandable if that’s the case, with so many of us stuck at home for so long now, with some of us working unimaginably difficult shifts before coming home, with others not working at all but following the daily passage of the sun past the window, gray dawn to inky dusk. Dinner again? Really? So soon?

Here’s what to do. Cook anyway. Cook something new, even if you don’t have all the ingredients. Cook to surprise yourself and maybe you will be surprised.

Like, take this Mark Bittman recipe for a creamy one-pot pasta with chicken and mushrooms (above). I’d never made it, and I didn’t have the right ingredients so maybe I still haven’t made it, but the notion of cooking dry pasta in the sauce that goes with it appealed to me, enough to get me to the kitchen, and so I set to work.

Mise en place. I had smoked sausage: commodity beef and liquid smoke shaped into a horseshoe. I had a big onion, some garlic, a box of pasta shells, a small can of puréed tomatoes, chicken broth, a heel of mozzarella. I had Parmesan. I always have hot sauce.

I sliced the sausage into coins and sautéed them crisp in olive oil, then added the onion, sliced, and the garlic, minced. When these were soft, I hit them with salt, pepper and hot sauce, then added the tomato purée and a couple of cups of broth. Got that bubbling, then added the shells and mixed them around. Covered the pot and lowered the heat. Spaced out for 15 minutes. Then, when the pasta was just about done, I took the pan off the heat and mixed into it the mozzarella, torn into pieces, and covered the top with Parmesan. It was delicious, a half-hour well spent. I loved cooking once more.

Other recipes you might try to get you out of the feeling that you’re performing a chore: tomato risotto; meatloaf stroganoff; ramen carbonara; mac and queso fundido; shakshuka with feta; tuna-macaroni salad; overnight oats; moo-shu pork.

There are many, many more ideas for what to cook when you don’t really want to cook waiting for you on NYT Cooking, including a huge collection of recipes and tips for cooking under quarantine. Many more than usual are free to use even if you haven’t yet subscribed to our site and apps. (We would love it if you decided to subscribe all the same, in order to support our work.)

Please visit us on Instagram as long as you’re opening tabs, and on Facebook, too, where we maintain an active community group that you may want to join, if you want to talk with like-minded cooks. We are on YouTube, of course. And we post links on Twitter. You can, of course, write us directly if you like. We offer help with recipes and our technology too. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with grillades or tuna poke, but if that Elmore Leonard quote intrigued you, you can get started on his work at ElmoreLeonard.com.

The Memphis photographer Jamie Harmon has been making portraits of his neighbors living under quarantine. They’re in The Bitter Southerner, and they’re remarkable.

What’s going to happen to chamber music, do you think? Here’s the Guarneri Quartet playing Beethoven, from the String Quartet in C Major, Op. 59, No. 3.

Finally, a one-off performance: Allen Ginsberg backed by The Clash. I did not know that happened. I’ll be back on Wednesday.