What to Cook This Weekend

View in Browser

Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Friday, April 10, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. It’s Good Friday, but not a good day for those stuck at home and jittery, bored, overworked, unemployed, out of yeast, in need of distraction, hungry for the platter of smoked pork with green beans and pickled hot peppers served at the Chinese place where you used to eat lunch twice a week, before the virus came. It’s frustrating, this isolation. It’s not how many of us are wired.

Cook anyway. I know you’re cooking all the time already, but don’t let up. Cooking helps. It makes things just a tiny bit better for yourself and for those who are stuck at home alongside you. It transforms time into sustenance, into deliciousness, into something you can offer to others or yourself as a gift. Do it right, and it’s possible to forget, if only for a moment, that we’re sheltered in place. It’s hard to feel anxious when you’ve made and consumed a huge sandwich in advance of a stroll to the couch for a Dagwood nap. And that’s my Saturday plan right there.

Some are planning for Easter on Sunday, even if the hunt for eggs isn’t happening, even if there’s no one coming for late lunch and a giant ham alongside a pile of dinner rolls, a pot of mustard, the deviled eggs (above), the asparagus, the whole megillah. This year, perhaps, you could prepare a simple leeks vinaigrette instead? Some high-rise buttery biscuits? Those and a pork chop can get you into the rebirth groove.

Others are continuing with Passover meals, or craving chocolate mug cakes. A creamy lemon pasta may be in the cards for you this weekend, or shoemaker’s chicken or the classic dinner of our time, a big pot of beans. You could try Dorie Greenspan’s carrot cake and ought to. Arroz con pollo? No-bake cookies? Give something new a try.

And don’t worry, at all, if you don’t have this ingredient or that one, to make that dish you’ve always wanted to try. You can riff off what you have, and then you’ll have a new recipe, one that’s entirely your own.

Like, you know Alison Roman’s spiced chickpea stew with chickpeas and turmeric, the one that’s so famous it has its own hashtag? I made it the other night with a lot of Jamaican curry powder in place of the turmeric, half the chickpeas and coconut milk because that’s all I had, and a metric ton of kale. Did I sizzle a half-pound of ground beef into the onions, garlic and ginger that make up the base of the stew at the start of the recipe? I did, and I added a dollop of hot mango chutney at the end. It was astonishingly good.

Come visit us at NYT Cooking for more recipes you can make into something else. Come even if you’re not a subscriber. We’ve put many more recipes than usual in front of our paywall. (That said, we’d be pleased if you did subscribe, all the same.)

Visit us, as well, on Instagram and YouTube. The news we report, we post on Twitter. And you should join our community group on Facebook while you’re surfing around. Run into trouble along the way? Reach out to us directly for help: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with furikake, pickled plums or the coronavirus, but this weekend could be the one where you start reading “Little Women” aloud to the family, to the cat, to the wall behind your desk.

Speaking of seaweed, you should read up on the kelp wars in Scotland, in Hakai. Wild!

I like these photographs of tractors, in Hobby Farms magazine. And these photographs of disappearing places in the South, in Garden & Gun.

Finally, I hope you’ll come see me At Home, a new collection page at The Times devoted to our reporters and critics’ best ideas for what to do while you’re cooped up, well, at home. Check that out and I’ll be back on Sunday. Thank you.