Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Friday, May 29, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. One of my favorite cookbooks is a community number out of southwest Florida, “The Gasparilla Cookbook,” published in 1961 by the Junior League of Tampa. There’s a painting on the cover, a strong-jawed piratical man in a blue striped shirt, wearing huge gold hoop earrings and a red polka-dot bandanna. He’s holding a platter above his head — shrimp Louie, a straw-covered bottle of Chianti, a bowl of grapes, a hunk of Swiss cheese — and he’s gazing down fiercely as if this were a romance novel and not a collection of recipes.

Inside: dips and cold salads; elegant preparations of fish and fowl; beef tenderloins; chiffon cakes; the whole story of postwar middle-class American fustiness in the kitchen. (Luncheon asparagus!) But there are great surprises as well, including a recipe for open-pit barbecue (“Slow Process”) that gave me a great mopping sauce I’d like to deploy this weekend on a grill full of barbecued chicken (above): a great deal of vinegar and butter with a half-can of crushed tomatoes, with black pepper, cayenne and salt to taste. Simmer that for a while, then use it to baste the meat. (“Use a new long-handled dish mop,” the League advises.)

I’d love for you to try that, but I recognize it’s not possible for everyone: You have no outdoor space; you have no grill; you don’t eat flesh; you have no desire for these sorts of shenanigans when the world outside is full of scaries and you’re worried for your job. I get it. There are days these days when it seems heroic just to fry an egg and eat it on toast.

Still, I’m hopeful for the weekend, for the joys it might bring. I loved Tejal Rao grappling with how to describe rasam, the souplike elixir of life that is the subject of her column in The New York Times Magazine this week, and loved the recipe for garlic rasam that she learned to make from Usha Prabakaran, the Chennai-based author of the 1,000-recipe “Usha’s Pickle Digest” and the forthcoming “Usha’s Rasam Digest.” I’d like to make that too this weekend, as much as the chicken.

Perhaps you’d prefer a pot of vegan black beans with coconut and ginger. You might try these smashed potatoes with a Thai-style chile and herb sauce, this beet dip with labneh, this Mediterranean lentil salad.

I like this classic pasta salad as well, with its mozzarella, avocado and basil, and these tacos al pastor, which we learned to make from Gabriela C á mara, the star Mexican chef. Would you consider seared salmon with citrus and arugula salad? I do know I’d like to have dessert on Saturday night at least: a blotkake, the Norwegian cream cake.

Thousands and thousands more recipes await your inspection on NYT Cooking. A lot more of them than usual are free for you to consider even if you aren’t yet a subscriber to our site and apps. I’ll ask you to think about subscribing anyway. Your subscription supports our work and allows it to continue.

Will you come visit us on Facebook and Instagram? There are good stories there, beautiful photographs, a fine community. We’re also on YouTube and Twitter. And you can write us for help if help is what you need, either with your cooking or our technology: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with sea salt or chickens from Bresse, but here are some more Google docs from my friends and colleagues, ad hoc guides to life during the pandemic. They’re intimate, raw, hilarious, smart. I hope you’ll read and share them widely.

In a similar vein, if you’re a pop-cultural sort, like to think about music and art, the kinda-blog, kinda-zine Moistworks is back and worth exploring.

John McMurray on the East Coast fisheries that no longer exist, in Field & Stream, may invoke nostalgia: long-ago trips for mackerel, cod and pollock, so great.

This guy Creezy’s Rube Goldberg machines are amazing, on YouTube.

Finally, it’s Noel Gallagher’s birthday. He is, improbably, 53. Here’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” live in London, 2000. See you on Sunday.