Go for the gold: What to Cook This Week

View in Browser

Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book.

Gentl and Hyers for The New York Times

Sunday, June 21, 2020

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Gabrielle Hamilton has a funny, wise and empathetic essay in The Times today about cooking at home during the coronavirus pandemic while married to a professional chef, while being a professional chef herself. Which is to say, it’s a story about being married, and the loving tensions that arise between spouses of different personalities during lockdown, as when your wife pulls a spongy, almost rotted red pepper out of the crisper and gently places it on the counter next to the compost bucket but not in the bucket itself.

“It was not a directive to throw it out,” Gabrielle wrote. “She just left it in front of the compost bin as a suggestion for my consideration.”

Gabrielle took up the challenge. A good half-cup of diced red pepper was still available amid the bruises and rot. She used it with corn and red onion, half of a serrano pepper and some poblanos, sweating each individually into a beautiful maque choux (above) she served as a condiment for pork burgers that night and straight from the fridge for lunch the next day.

I don’t have a soft and wrinkly red pepper. But I’ve got a fresh one, and some corn and red onion, too. Is there a serrano around here somewhere? A poblano? Maque choux’s on the docket for tonight, to serve alongside grilled shrimp. Sunday dinner!

On Monday, I’m thinking, you might make the chef Suvir Saran’s palak ki tiki, potato patties with loads of spinach, so good.

Tuesday’s for Lidey Heuck’s one-pot smoky fish with tomatoes, olives and couscous, a lively dinner that comes together in just half an hour.

On Wednesday I’ll get up a little early, surprise the family with my favorite new pancake hack, from that genius Jerrelle Guy: sheet-pan chocolate chip pancakes. (Jerrelle does not require heating the sheet pan in the oven before adding the batter. I do. I like the crisp edges and bottom that come as a result.)

And then for dinner: Kay Chun’s sausage and peppers pasta with broccoli.

For Thursday, David Tanis’s smoky tomato and anchovy salsa, which he uses for grilled swordfish. I’ll probably go with porgy instead, because porgy’s what I’ve got and what I like. Cook’s choice. It’d probably be great on a seitan cutlet.

And then to round out the week, the pork chops in cherry-pepper sauce I learned to cook at the elbow of the chef Mario Carbone, at Carbone in New York, back when you could be at chef’s elbows to report.

Many, many thousands more recipes to cook this week are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. More of them than usual are free to use even if you aren’t yet a subscriber to our site and apps. That’s on account of the pandemic. Won’t you consider subscribing anyway? Your subscriptions allow our work to continue.

And do get in touch if you run into trouble with anything as you’re cooking or using our site. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.

Now, it’s a long distance from kitchens and pantries, but my pal John Strausbaugh has a fascinating piece in The Wilson Quarterly about the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals of the Korean War, which most Americans associate with the movie and later television series “M*A*S*H.” Those cultural products didn’t come out of Hollywood originally, though. They were born of a novel written by a veteran of the war, a conservative Republican doctor named Hiester Richard Hornberger.

For ProPublica, Joaquin Sapien and Joe Sexton wrote a grim, unsettling story about a nursing home in Troy, N.Y., that followed Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s directive to accept patients receiving treatment for Covid-19.

Finally, heading in another direction entirely, you should read Dwight Garner in The Times, on the death of handwritten letters. If it makes you sad, you can always send a virtual one to me, as I do to you. I’m at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I’ll be back on Monday.