This Is the Best Tofu Recipe

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Yewande Komolafe's tofu with peanut sauce and coconut rice.

David Malosh for The New York Times

Monday, May 18, 2020

This Is the Best Tofu Recipe

Sam Sifton

Good morning. I’ve been doing these occasional happy-hour conversations with food people from The Times, livestreaming them on the internet and taking questions from those who sign up to watch and listen. I’ve talked with Melissa Clark. I’ve talked with Kim Severson. And this week, on Thursday, May 21, at 6 p.m. Eastern time, I’ll talk with Yewande Komolafe, who you may know for her Essential Nigerian Recipes on NYT Cooking, and who is famous in my house for this baked tofu with peanut sauce and coconut-lime rice (above).

Yewande’s the greatest, and that tofu situation is firmly in my running list of top 5 recipes of the year. R.S.V.P., if you would, and come join us on Thursday. (Definitely make the recipe this week so you can thank her in person.)

Here’s another great recipe, which Mark Bittman pulled out of the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten many years ago, for chicken with vinegar. All recipes are storytelling. JGV, as he is known to those who write about food for money, learned to make the dish from the great Paul Bocuse, who learned it himself when he was cooking for Eugénie Brazier as a youngster, at La Mère Brazier in Lyon, France. It has big vinegar energy. You may want to cut the sauce with a splash of water.

More excellence: This five-minute hummus Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook developed for their cookbook “Israeli Soul,” terrific with Samin Nosrat’s salad-e shirazi and a pile of warm flatbreads.

Also, these slow-cooker barbecue pork and beans; this linguine with asparagus pesto; this blueberry rhubarb pie.

I’d like to make stir-fried sweet potatoes this week, and cod cakes, and slow-roasted Turkish lamb. I’d like to bake an almond cake, and cook this blanquette, with scallops in place of the usual veal. I scored a nice beef tenderloin the other day for the freezer. I’d like to thaw it carefully and use some of it for Gabrielle Hamilton’s ace steak tartare, and the rest the next day for filets mignon with morels.

Thousands and thousands more ideas for what to cook are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. A lot more than usual are free to browse even if you aren’t a subscriber to our site and apps. (That’s on account of the coronavirus and our desire to make living at home during a pandemic a little more pleasurable. But I’ll ask you to consider subscribing, all the same. Your subscription allows us to keep doing this work.)

Come visit us on Facebook, while you’re at it, and on Instagram, too. We’re on YouTube, of course, and we post our news to Twitter. Give us a follow. And to get in touch if anything goes wrong along the way. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.

Now, it’s a long-haul flight (remember those?) from apple sauce and flapjacks, but this is a fascinating story in The Atlantic by Ariel Sabar, about the “discovery” of some first-century papyrus, allegedly verses from the Gospel of Mark.

Zach Baron on Robert Pattinson in GQ, with photographs by Robert Pattinson, is pretty fun.

Listen to Vieux Farka Touré, “Ai du,” live at Joe’s Pub, back in the day.

Finally, let’s wrap up with the American poet Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), and her “May Night.”

The spring is fresh and fearless
And every leaf is new,
The world is brimmed with moonlight,
The lilac brimmed with dew.

Here in the moving shadows
I catch my breath and sing —
My heart is fresh and fearless
And over-brimmed with spring.

See you on Wednesday.