Go for the gold: Cook to Connect

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David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Cook to Connect

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Concentration is hard to come by these days, amid the nation’s strife. We are living through a tough and chaotic and wrenching time, filled with fury and an abiding sadness. We’re unsettled. We’re tense. We’re divided. The emotions arrange themselves in combinations that make it hard to work, to read, to watch, to listen, much less to think.

Cooking can help. The act of preparing food is a deliberate and caring one, even if you’re just making yourself a bowl of oatmeal at the end of a long night of worry. The way you sprinkle raisins over the top is an intentional act of kindness to yourself. So what I’m doing now, amid my restless skimming of nonfiction and news, thrillers and literature, poems that don’t bring solace: I read recipes, think about who in my family they might please, and I cook.

It might be something simple — the omelet that Ferran Adrià makes using only eggs, butter and potato chips. Or something more complex, like Melissa Clark’s new recipe for a spicy grilled salmon salad with lime, chiles and herbs (above).

Yewande Komolafe’s recipe for ginger-cauliflower soup would bring a smile to one of my children, as would, for another, Clare de Boer’s recipe for grilled chicken skewers with tarragon and yogurt. (Works great under the broiler if you don’t have a grill.)

Here’s Samantha Seneviratne with a fresh strawberry pie, and Colu Henry with linguine and clam sauce, and Kim Severson with the congrí she learned to make from Yolanda Horruitiner during a reporting trip to Cuba. One of those may bring you comfort, or provide a point of connection for you with someone else, or with the wider world.

But it’s worth pointing out, you don’t always need a recipe, to cook and cook well and make others pleased. Sometimes the muse just arrives and that’s that. The other night, there was a big bag of plain tortilla chips in the back of the pantry, and I had some ground beef and cheese, a can of beans, some lettuce and limes, some sour cream and hot sauce. A small smile came upon me then, unbidden. I sautéed the beef, cooked the beans with onions and garlic, cumin and orange juice, melted the cheese with cream, heated the chips. Nachos spark joy.

Thousands and thousands of actual recipes are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. (I love these sweet potatoes with tahini butter, from Samin Nosrat.) A lot more of them than usual are free to use even if you aren’t yet a subscriber to our site and apps. (But I’ll ask you anyway: Would you think about subscribing? Your subscription allows our work to continue.)

And if something goes wrong along the way, either with your cooking or our technology, please get in touch: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.

Now, it won’t make you happy nor teach you to cook, but it’s still an important read: Michael Pollan on America’s broken food system, in The New York Review of Books.

For Outside, Carrie Battan visited Serenbe, a wellness community south of Atlanta, and it’s a surreal thing to read right now, like a dispatch from another time.

Finally, here’s Latria Graham in Garden & Gun, “A Dream Uprooted,” an essay about her fight to save her family’s farm. I’ll return on Friday.