Go for the gold: What to Cook This Week

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Davide Luciano for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Gozde Eker.

Sunday, June 28, 2020

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. A number of years ago, my friend and colleague Tejal Rao met up with a sous chef named Julia Goldberg at the vegetarian restaurant Superiority Burger in New York, where Goldberg then worked. Tejal had come to learn the secrets of one of Goldberg’s most elegant creations: A vegan ranch dressing (above), “tangy and creamy,” Tejal wrote for The Times, “turbocharged with the familiar mouth-smacking umami of bottled ranch.”

Vegan ranch, of course, cannot contain buttermilk or mayonnaise, the dressing’s traditional base. Goldberg’s version used tahini instead, and lemon juice and maple syrup, and a huge amount of chopped parsley, dill and chives. It’s a pretty phenomenal dressing when used atop grilled romaine, as Tejal suggested. It’s also terrific with roasted potatoes, alongside chicken wings or dabbed on a lambchop run under the grill. But I’ve grown to love it most as a burger condiment, whether that patty is made of beef or mushrooms and beets.

Won’t you make vegan ranch this evening, then, to give yourself a little joy when joy is so thin on the ground? Won’t you make it because it’s strange and madcap and delicious, at a time when those things might actually provide some relief? Vegan ranch dressing on a burger! That could be Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times.”

(Not feeling it? Here’s a fine roasted salmon with toasted sesame slaw, from Kay Chun.)

On Monday, you could steer into nostalgia, make this recipe for an elegant tuna-macaroni salad that Amanda Hesser adapted a million years ago from the restaurant Clementine, in Los Angeles.

For Tuesday’s meal, vichyssoise against the summer heat. (If you’re working from home, or at any rate at home during the day, make the soup at lunch, so it can get a good chill on in the refrigerator before dinner.)

A baked spinach and artichoke pasta on Wednesday night? Yes, please.

On Thursday, I’m thinking, you might try Florence Fabricant’s neat recipe for risotto Marseille-style, which is to say with the flavors of bouillabaisse. (Really!)

Then on Friday, another fantastic throwback, from a 2015 Francis Lam article about the mysteries of Manhattan’s curry row, on East Sixth Street: home-style Bangladeshi chicken korma, courtesy of Shama Mubdi, whose husband owned restaurants there.

There are thousands and thousands more recipes you might cook this week awaiting you on NYT Cooking. I hope you will consider subscribing so that you can see all of them. Your subscriptions support our work.

We will support you in return. If anything goes wrong while you are cooking or using our technology, please reach out for help. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with split peas or harissa, and I know I’ve mentioned it before, but if you didn’t click before, now I think you ought to: A.O. Scott’s “The Essential Spike Lee,” in The Times.

You ever read Breece D’J Pancake? Here’s his short story “Trilobites,” from 1977.

Join Raymond Pettibon in the studio, courtesy of David Zwirner.

Finally, it is the cartoonist George Booth’s birthday. He is 94. Here’s an old profile of him in The New Yorker, if you’re interested. And if you are, you may want to track down a copy of “The Essential George Booth” as well. I’ll be back on Monday.