Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Erin Jeanne McDowell.

Friday, June 19, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Happy Juneteenth. For The Times, Veronica Chambers put together a special package of articles about the holiday. Of course there’s food involved, as in Nicole Taylor’s curated collection of Juneteenth recipes (and in her article about how black chefs are celebrating), and in Toni Tipton-Martin’s essay about how the women she wrote about in her “The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks” transformed her, in the kitchen and on the page. Dig in.

And not just to the reading. If you’re celebrating, tonight would be great for Nicole’s recipe for mushrooms roasted with a Memphis-style dry rub, employing the rub used by Greg Collier, the chef and co-owner of Leah & Louise in Charlotte, N.C. It pairs nicely with Collier’s recipe for sweet potato pikliz. And for dessert, if you can manage it, Jerrelle Guy’s recipe for strawberry pretzel pie (above).

Saturday’s the first day of summer. Time to think about summer barbecue. (I’m thinking of pulling out the San Antonio chef Quealy Watson’s recipe for a South Texas barbecued duck.) Time to think about sunny, gorgeous summer pastas. Time to think about summer cocktails.

I’d like to make Gabrielle Hamilton’s recipe for rock shrimp rolls this weekend. Maybe her crab toast as well.

I’d like to have morning glory muffins on Sunday, and pan bagnat for lunch. (Listen to Melissa Clark: Make the sandwiches on Saturday afternoon, and let the flavors marry. They’ll be much, much better for the time spent together.) Dinner: Stuffed shells, filled with spinach and ricotta.

Thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this week await you on NYT Cooking. We’ve made more of them than usual free to use even if you aren’t a subscriber to our site and apps. That’s on account of the coronavirus pandemic. Will you consider subscribing anyway? Your subscriptions support our work.

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

Now, it’s nothing to do with mincemeat or crullers, but I’ve talked to you before about the band Khruangbin. Here is their story, by Marcus J. Moore in The Times.

I’m late to it, but so might you be: Tana French’s thrillery “The Witch Elm,” from 2018.

Artforum puts its spotlight on Kehinde Wiley’s show “The Yellow Wallpaper” at William Morris Gallery in London. That’s worth exploring.

Finally, I’ve been wondering about you and your cooking and how your relationship with food and the kitchen has changed over the course of the pandemic. I shop a lot less, but buy a lot more when I do. That has created some issues with ingredient management and, I think, led me to a much more fluid kind of cooking, more dependent on improvisation and substitution than at any time in the past. How about you? Glad about your stand mixer? Thankful for your knife sharpener? Eating more oysters? Eating less meat? Do let me know: foodeditor@nytimes.com. And I’ll see you on Sunday.