Your New Favorite Beans

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Gentl and Hyers for The New York Times (Photography and Styling)

Monday, May 4, 2020

Your New Favorite Beans

Sam Sifton

Good morning. It is the 125th day of the year, and you’d be forgiven for believing that you’ve spent the bulk of them inside this year, or the bulk of them at work, or both, or that you’ve been out of work that long, or that it’s possible time itself has become moot, a clock spinning without measure.

The results are hallucinatory. I might wake up and think: It’d be good to go swimming today. It’d be good to fly business class to Singapore. It’d be good to hug the guy running the bodega for the past 125 days, selling masks and cigarettes, lottery tickets, plantains, beer. (“Shukrun,” I say when we’re done with our business. Thank you. It’s my only Arabic. “Afwan,” he says in return. We nod and that’s that.)

Instead I make food, sustenance against the sameness: cold orange slices and yogurt for breakfast, with crumbled granola; sliced cold leftover pork and cracklings for lunch, with a bread and butter pickles and a swipe of mayonnaise on a warm, buttered tortilla; Tejal Rao’s ace new recipe for baked rajma (above) for dinner, a Punjabi-style pot of red beans and rice to which you might add a shot of cream or, failing that, a few knobs of mozzarella. Cooking the dish recently, Tejal wrote for The Times, she resorted to coins of string cheese from the back of her fridge.

How about you? Have you made this chicken piccata recently? (Try it with swordfish sometime, if you come across any.) Or baked orzo with artichokes and peas? A Kentucky hot brown? Project city! As are these beef empanadas. If it’s all too much, you could downshift into an easy pea soup from Nigella Lawson.

I like this Vietnamese lamb recipe from Mark Bittman. I don’t have lamb shoulder, though, so I’m going to use it on a boneless leg, and grill it: crisp in some spots, rare in others. (Leftovers become banh mi, or more fodder for buttery warm tortillas, with pickled jalapeños.)

And tomorrow’s Cinco de Mayo! Maybe you could lean into that? We definitely have recipe ideas. (Queso, queso, queso!)

There are thousands and thousands more ideas for what to cook waiting for you on NYT Cooking — and more than usual are free to use even if you aren’t a subscriber to our site and apps. (We’d like it very much if you did subscribe, though. Your subscriptions are the fuel for our stoves, the ink for our cartridges, our lifeblood.)

Please visit us on Facebook, where we maintain a community group that’s big and kind. Our Instagram page is extremely beautiful. Follow us! 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 write us directly: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (You can also write to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every message I get, even if I can’t get back to everyone who writes.)

Now, it’s a far cry from tea cakes and deep-fried hot dogs, but I loved this investigation The New York Times Book Review did of what’s on the bookshelves of famous people broadcasting from home. Of course Prince Charles has a Dick Francis novel above his left shoulder.

Also in the Book Review, you might want to join Group Text, our virtual reading group, which is tackling “Sea Wife,” by Amity Gaige.

For Elle, Veronique Hyland wrote about rereading Diane von Furstenberg’s 1976 “Book of Beauty,” and it’s hilarious: “Lazy, voluptuous stretching,” DVF opined, is the best form of exercise, nude, in a room full of flowers.

Finally, did I mention I’m spinning up another newsletter, about life at home? It’s called At Home, and I’ll send it once a week, and I hope it’ll be of assistance to you during this unsettling time. You can sign up for it here. See you on Wednesday.