Go for the gold: What to Cook Right Now

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Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Rebecca Jurkevich.

Monday, June 8, 2020

What to Cook Right Now

Sam Sifton

Good morning. I hope you got some time to rest and reflect this weekend, to sit with where we’re at in the world, and where we might go. I hope the conversations you were able to have at the kitchen table were good, even if they were just with yourself, and I hope that this week brings you grace and hope in equal measure, even against a backdrop of anger and anxiety.

I believe cooking can help. Both the activity of it and the fellowship it provides — again, even if you’re just cooking for yourself. It is difficult not to become a little cheerful, for instance, making Ali Slagle’s puckish new recipe for crispy sour cream and onion chicken (above), or Klancy Miller’s elegant mushroom Parmesan tart. You’ll tell stories about those.

I love our recipe for poke, brought to us by the Hawaiian poet and memoirist Garrett Hongo, who first tasted the dish when he was 19, at a homecoming party when he returned to Oahu after nine years in Los Angeles: “delicious rubies of cubed fish dressed in light sesame oil,” he wrote for The Times, “garnished with minced bits of reddish-brown seaweed and the ground centers of kukui nuts.”

I’d make that if I had kukui nuts or marlin, make everyone listen to me read passages from Hongo’s poem “Cruising 99” after dinner. I don’t have either, though. What I have is Atlantic bonito, macadamia nuts and a recipe for an East Coast version of the dish. I think I’ll still read from the poem.

Another gem: The pecan pesto we scored from the chef Mashama Bailey, of The Grey in Savannah, Ga. She took an Italian sauce and made it Southern, and then into something more than that with the use of Thai basil. If you make it yourself this week, serve it mixed into a bowl of spaghetti, you’ll be doing it all summer. (You can learn more about Bailey here and here.)

More cold fish? C.J. Chivers has an excellent recipe for the ceviche he makes out of bass scraps on his homestead in South County, R.I. The recipe works great with bluefish if you don’t truck with striped bass. I sometimes add jalapeño, lime, maybe a diced mango.

Alternatively, how about the recipe for the chef Charles Phan’s shaking beef? Or the Kentucky butter cake with which Nell Lewis won the 1963 Pillsbury Bake-Off? At the very least, if you’re run down already, crouched in your office in your bedroom or reading newsletters while waiting in line at the bank, feeling those top-of-the-week blues, promise yourself a big Bad Day at Work cocktail in a couple of hours, courtesy of Jennifer Steinhauer and Helene Cooper, two great mixologists in our news bureau in Washington, D.C.

Thousands and thousands more recipes are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. In light of the coronavirus pandemic, a lot more of them than usual are free to use even if you aren’t yet a subscriber to our site and apps. I hope you will think about subscribing all the same. Your subscription supports our work.

And if anything goes wrong along the way, either with your cooking or our technology? We are standing by. Just write for help: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s a far cry from mincemeat and tarragon, but I’ve found some diversion in the latest thriller from Michael Connelly, “Fair Warning,” about the investigative reporter Jack McEvoy.

Likewise in new fiction from Haruki Murakami, “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” in The New Yorker.

Finally, please attend to Zachary Small in The Times, writing about the murals that have gone up on walls across the country, to memorialize the lives of those killed by police. The images are haunting. I’ll be back on Wednesday.