What to Cook This Week

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Marcus Nilsson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Brian Preston-Campbell. Prop stylist: PJ Mehaffey.

Sunday, April 12, 2020

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning, and Happy Easter to those celebrating. I’m roasting a pork shoulder low and slow for the bulk of the day, a junior-varsity bo ssam (above) cooked in the spirit of the chef David Chang and his erstwhile writing partner Peter Meehan, who introduced the dish to home cooks back in 2009.

We’ll wrap the shards of skin and pillow-soft flesh in iceberg lettuce, for that was what we could get, and dip the packets in ssam sauce made from the last of the aged gochujang and ssamjang I scored off the great Korean home cook Maangchi, when I cooked with her last summer in a rental condo in Montauk, at the East End of Long Island. There’ll be rice and leeks braised in oyster sauce and, if we’re lucky and the cards fall right, a couple dozen oysters as well, from Peeko, in Little Peconic Bay. Could be a very good day.

This week that’s coming will bring what it will bring: a little hope; terrible news; long runs at dawn when the streets are quiet; long runs at the desk in the room that’s quiet, hoping the wifi doesn’t fail, at work, at school, at neither but seeking connection all the same.

I’m hoping you’ll cook and eat well, at least. You could make lentils cacciatore one day. Crisp gnocchi with brussels sprouts and brown butter on another. Turmeric black-pepper chicken with asparagus. Crispy spiced cauliflower steaks. You might try a chocolate tres leches cake. You should definitely try sourdough bread. And then, as you sail into next weekend, garlic-ginger chicken breasts with cilantro and mint. You did it! Another week down in the books.

Come visit us at NYT Cooking for more ideas on what to cook this week. Come even if you’re not yet a subscriber. There are many more recipes than usual in front of our paywall. (Of course, it’d be cool if you did subscribe, all the same, to support our work.)

You can find us on Instagram and YouTube, too, and on Twitter. And you should consider joining our community group on Facebook while you’re at it. You can reach us directly if something goes sideways while you’re cooking, or with our technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with radishes or high-fat European butter, but there’s a new collection of novellas from Don Winslow out, “Broken.” Janet Maslin thinks you ought to read it. She’s right. Here’s how one of them starts: “No one knows how the chimp got the revolver.” (You can find many other things to read and listen to and watch on a new collection page at The Times, At Home, devoted to our reporters and critics’ best ideas for what to do while you’re cooped up, well, at home.)

And I was on the radio program “Fresh Air” this week, talking to Dave Davies about cooking and life right now. Maybe you’ll give that a listen?

Finally, I want to tell you about a sermon that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., on Easter Sunday in 1959.

In it, King declared there are but three groups of people in the world. There are the lawless, he said, those who break laws or don’t abide by the codes of society. There are the law-abiding, those whose standards of conduct derive from without, from man-made law, from societal mores — that’s probably most of us, he declared. And then there are those, King said, who follow interior codes of conduct, rules that are larger than themselves. “These are the people who are obedient to the unenforceable,” he said, “the people who, in the words of, those beautiful words that Shakespeare said about Desdemona: ‘They hold it something of a vice in their goodness not to do more than is required.’ These are the people who change history and make history. They come occasionally.”

They are all around us today, I thought when I read the sermon, in hospitals and E.M.S. trucks, in firehouses and supermarkets and driving buses, living and working to help people outside their homes, in the midst of a pandemic, while many of the rest of us worry if we have enough yeast to bake bread. They deserve our attention and deepest thanks, for without them everything would be worse. Thank them today, if you can, and I’ll be back tomorrow.