What to Cook This Week

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Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

Sunday, May 17, 2020

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. There was a great moment the other day as I was driving down to the market for supplies, a rare traffic jam on a stretch of road that’s generally barren, cars backed up in both directions so that a family of Canada geese could waddle across the road, moving from a pond on one side to the bay on the other. The mother goose had her neck stretched low to the pavement, guiding the goslings along, and if Michael the police officer wasn’t there with his whistle to help, it was still reminiscent of Robert McCloskey’s “Make Way for Ducklings,” and I knew every driver in line was smiling behind her mask.

I like those trips to the market, once or twice a month. Like being on the road, seeing how the trees are flowering, how the patchy winter-worn grass is starting to come back thick, how the water’s still clear at the bridge. I like how kind everyone is at the store, gloved and masked and keeping well apart, how patient the front-liners at the register are as I pack up my stores.

“I found tofu,” I told one of them, excitedly. Her eyes twinkled. “We always have tofu,” she said.

I pressed it when I got home, cubed it, coated it in cornstarch, shallow-fried it twice so that it was super crunchy on the outside and cloudlike within, and then tossed it in a sauce of gochujang cut through with soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, ginger and a drizzle of honey. I ate it on rice with scallions and roasted asparagus. Maybe you could try that tonight, or some night soon?

You could make Mark Bittman’s ribollita this week as well, a robust vegetable stew that I think is a perfect foil for garlic bread. Also: green goddess salmon with potatoes and snap peas (above). It would be nice this week to eat a big salad with grains. And to cook and consume a foolproof tarte Tatin. (That recipe’s a project, since you need to “age” the apples. Start midweek, though, and you’ll be eating well on Friday night.)

Would you consider a lamb tagine? If you’re at home these days as most of us are, it’s a good way to make the house smell terrific all afternoon long. And what do you think of a béarnaise sauce, to drizzle over asparagus, oven fries or a steak?

I recommend blueberry muffins for breakfast, one of these days, and a radish and butter sandwich for lunch. Dinner that night: flattened chicken thighs with roasted lemon slices. Chocolate dump-it cake for dessert.

There are many thousands more ideas for what to cook this week waiting for you on NYT Cooking. A lot more than usual are free for the cooking even if you aren’t yet a subscriber to our site and apps. (I’d ask you to consider subscribing, though, all the same. Your subscription allows us to keep doing this work.)

We also live, as they say, an off-platform life. You can find us on Facebook, for instance, and on Instagram, too. We’re on YouTube and Twitter as well. Follow us! And if anything goes wrong along the way, please reach out to us directly for help. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com, and we’re eager to help. We will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with chow-chow or the price of salmon, but you should read this amazing story in The Guardian about how a group of teenage boys survived alone on an island for 15 months, after being shipwrecked in 1965. It’s not “The Lord of the Flies.”

Here’s the art critic Jerry Saltz on his life during the pandemic, and it’s sad and moving and strange.

P.J. Harvey live on the BBC Four Sessions is really strong. Play it on a big screen, loud.

Finally, I wish I could take you out into Everglades National Park, get way up into the backcountry where the snook hide in the mangroves and the tarpon roll and you can find redfish on that corner over there that looks like all the others except for that’s the one where the fish are. But I can’t and I can’t go myself this year, so it’s time to read Peter Matthiessen’s “Shadow Country” again. Won’t you join me? You’ll be glad you did. I’ll be back on Monday.