What to Cook This Weekend

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Skillet chicken with tomatoes, pancetta, and mozzarella.

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Friday, April 3, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. You had enough of beans, of stressed-out breadmaking, of weird lunchtime sandwiches and these new morning rituals that have sprung up like daffodils through the loam? It’s been five days of work at the kitchen table, on the couch, in the basement, wherever you can perch where, in my case, there’s not a child in virtual school or a spouse on a video call, a cat stretched out in the sun, the dog looking ready, again, for a walk. Then dinner, say pizza chicken (above), hastily prepared just as it was before the coronavirus came, and served too late, before everyone tips into bed to start all over again in the gray light of morning. Five days of this at least.

Enough! Take a break this weekend, please. Cook not for sustenance or survival, but for pure pleasure, with whatever ingredients you have on hand, even if that’s just the last of the whole-wheat flour, two cans of anchovies, an orange and some dusty old chocolate from the back of the shelf. Make happiness out of what you have.

What a joy to make Dorie Greenspan’s Lisbon chocolate cake, for instance, and to eat it in the afternoon, while doing a puzzle or watching Borg play McEnroe in the 1980 Wimbledon finals. What delight you may derive from assembling a matzo lasagna, especially if you’ve followed Melissa Clark’s advice and made your own matzo to do it.

You could make fruit salad this weekend, a taste of summer and its freedoms. Melissa’s sweet and spicy one is a dream. Or you could bake cheese Danish, perhaps to remind you of the coffee cart in front of the office, when you worked in an office, El Jefecito in his stainless-steel realm.

Speaking of food-service professionals, here’s the extraordinary fried eggplant sandwich from Frankies Spuntino in Brooklyn, a fantastic project if you make your own ciabatta to frame it. Here’re the brown-butter Rice Krispies treats Julia Moskin learned to make at the Tasting Room in Manhattan a long ways back. You could make the smoke-roasted chicken they used to serve at the Publican in Chicago, and serve it over fries from a bag (no judgments here).

Take a spin through our recipe collections at NYT Cooking and see what appeals. We’ve made a lot more of our recipes than usual free for the taking even if you haven’t yet subscribed. (Though of course we’d be happy if you did subscribe, in order to support our work and allow it to continue.)

Further inspiration may be found on our Instagram feed and on our YouTube channel. You can find our news of the day on Twitter. We’re corresponding with readers on our community group on Facebook. Come join us. And, please, if something goes wrong while you’re cooking or trying to access the site or apps, please reach out directly: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with cooking, nothing to do with pantries or Dutch ovens or that chef’s knife you ought to sharpen tomorrow, but here’s Leyland Cecco in The Guardian, on the life and death of Takaya the lone sea wolf. It’s heartbreaking.

Maybe you haven’t run across this enjoyable column by Valerie Stivers in The Paris Review, about cooking from literature: “Eat Your Words.”

Finally, remember travel? Rent “Whale Rider” this weekend and dream of the trip you’ll take to New Zealand someday, those wide-open vistas, all that green. I’ll see you on Sunday.