Our New Favorite Ingredient

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David Malosh for The New York Times

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Our New Favorite Ingredient

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Pete Wells has a terrific story in The Times today about a surprising development in the quarantine many of us are living under still: Americans are cooking a lot of fish. With no restaurants to visit for shrimp scampi (above), broiled salmon, fried squid or sole meunière, we’re turning to the homemade variety instead and learning, perhaps, that the fears some have about cooking fish at home — that it’s hard, that it smells up the joint — are largely unfounded. Sales of canned and frozen seafood were up 37 percent in April, Pete found, and 13 percent for fresh.

Will you join the party? Fish tacos are a nice place to start. So’s this speedy fish chowder. I scored a delicious batch of ramp pesto from a friend who’d made a lot, and used it on oven-baked salmon with leeks and potatoes, along with dollops of ricotta. You could try something similar, off that prompt. You could make Tejal Rao’s recipe for chepa vepudu, a simple fish fry from southeastern India. Or Melissa Clark’s big-flavored fish cakes with herbs and chiles.

I’ve been getting loads of oysters these past few weeks — purchased contact-free from farmers like Peeko and Peconic Gold — and if I shuck the bulk of them to eat raw with Texas Pete, they’re pretty great butter-fried as well, or used in a chowder. Pan-roasted fish fillets with herb butter? Now’s the time.

On the other hand, it’d be great to eat a big platter of Japanese fried chicken this week. I’d love to have chiles rellenos. I’d love to have tofu makhani. I’d love to have a visiting cake.

Also in The Times today, Julia Moskin’s delightful profile of the HGTV personality and cook Joanna Gaines. Of course there are recipes there, too: for sour cream chicken enchiladas, a kale and bacon hash brown casserole and peanut butter brownies.

And do make sure to read J. Kenji López-Alt on the pleasures of slow-cooking large cuts of meat, and then freezing the results for a whole plethora of exciting, practical meals. Try it!

There are many thousands more ideas for what to cook right now waiting for you on NYT Cooking — many more than usual are free to use even if you aren’t yet a subscriber to our site and apps. (I hope you will consider subscribing all the same, though. Subscriptions support our work.)

Come see us on Facebook, or on Instagram. You can join us on YouTube and Twitter as well. And if anything goes wrong along the way, either with your cooking or our technology, please just ask for help: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s a long, terrifying distance from chicken and waffles, but I think you should read Lawrence Wright’s new pandemic thriller, “The End of October,” which was reviewed in The Times by Douglas Preston.

Podcast alert: Reena Flores of The Washington Post talking sourdough with Karen Colberg of King Arthur Flour and the bread maker Seamus Blackley.

Here’s Peter Gabriel, “In Your Eyes,” from the Secret World Live tour, 1993.

Finally, Pam McCarthy is stepping down as deputy editor of The New Yorker, a job she’s had since 1995: a champion of change, as the editors note in her final issue. Hers will be big shoes to fill. I’ll be back on Friday.