We Are All Doing the Best That We Can

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Craig Lee for The New York Times

Monday, April 6, 2020

We Are All Doing the Best That We Can

Sam Sifton

Good morning. I took the dog to the beach on Saturday, stayed a long way away from people, stared out at the elegant gannets prowling for bunker, at a trio of terns pinwheeling in the sun, at a bufflehead couple floating on the swell. Then I went home and made sourdough pineapple muffins, riffing off Marian Burros’s elegant recipe for the blueberry ones they used to make at Jordan Marsh in Boston. This was not like me to do, for I’m not generally a baker and rarely an improvisatory one. But they were light and sweet and a little salty, and the children were pleased not to face a bowl of cereal again, the same scrambled eggs, the same heel of toast, the breakfast monotony of a life spent schooling and working and living at home.

We have to labor to find beauty and pleasure and deliciousness now, weeks into the self-isolation that remains our best bet for flattening the rate of coronavirus infection in the United States and across the globe. We need to seek it out, actively, at odd times of the day and night and more often than not at the stove. There can be a strange new joy in preparing food now, in trying new recipes, in delighting at the challenge of cooking with what you have.

Try something unfamiliar for lunch today — a sandwich of Cheddar, cucumbers and marmalade, for instance, or perfect cup ramen (above) with a poached egg in it, a pat of butter, a slice of American cheese. Make dinner tonight so as to impress yourself and astonish your family, something different from all the nights of recent memory, all those beans, all those tray bakes and pastas. The changeup may deliver joy.

I like this recipe for oven-fried chicken that Marian Burros got out of Lindy Boggs, the Louisiana politician (and Cokie Roberts’s mom). So, too, Florence Fabricant’s quinoa salad with Swiss chard and goat cheese, and David Tanis’s zucchini flan. Tonight, you could make Craig Claiborne’s curried shepherd’s pie. Or Alexa Weibel’s vegetarian mushroom shawarma pitas. (No pita? Make your own!)

Alternatively, don’t. You didn’t go to the market on the weekend because you figured so many others would and didn’t want to be around them. You’re down to pantry staples. You don’t have quinoa, and mushrooms are a dream. That’s cool. We can work with that. My mantra now, always: We are all of us doing the best that we can.

Do you have beans? Here is how to cook them. You can use them in this cheesy, spicy black bean bake. You can make them with bacon, as they did at the restaurant St. John, in London. You can serve them on toast.

Rummage in the freezer. That bag of tater tots could be a casserole That bag of mixed vegetables could be a stir-fry. I defrosted what I thought were some pork chops. The package turned out to be a small, boneless leg of lamb. I slathered it in oil, ground cumin and salt, then grilled it for a large-format version of Melissa Clark’s cumin-lamb stir-fry, to serve with rice and some roasted green beans that were about 12 hours from turning wrinkly and grim. So good!

Just take a spin through our recipe collections at NYT Cooking and see if something strikes your fancy, something new or different to you. It can be like a game. We’ve made a lot more of our recipes than usual free for the taking even if you haven’t subscribed to our site and apps. (There’s no question we’d be happy if you did subscribe, of course, to support our work.)

You can find further inspiration on our Instagram feed, and on our YouTube channel. The news we report for The Times is on Twitter. Our subscribers gather in a community group on Facebook. We hang out there too. And you can reach us directly, should anything go wrong along the way: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise.

Now, it’s nothing to do with recipes or the coronavirus, but you should check in on the sea otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium right now. The live-cam footage is soothing. (Africam is pretty good as well.)

It is almost impossible to imagine right now, but tens and tens of thousands of people assembled in Central Park in Manhattan to watch Paul Simon play in 1991.

Let’s check in with our Jenna Wortham, who kept a wellness diary for Vanity Fair.

Finally, I hope you’ll come visit me At Home, a new collection page at The Times that’s devoted to our best ideas for what to do in the house or apartment, while maintaining social distance from others. There’s a lot there to recommend. Check it out, and I’ll be back on Wednesday.