Go for the gold: July 2020

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Heami Lee for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Rebecca Bartoshesky.

Friday, July 31, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Here’s the beginning of Gabrielle Hamilton’s Eat column in The Times this week, and I think she’s speaking for a lot of us:

Lately I’ve been worn out by my own home cooking. It’s not the toil that’s getting to me; it’s more that I feel fatigued by the familiarity of it: the predictability of my own kitchen habits, the recognizability of my own cooking voice, the monotony of what I always throw in my cart as I zigzag the aisles at the grocery store on autopilot. Everyone I know has had a similar malaise recently — all of us feeling rather short on enthusiasm for this monogamous intimacy with our three-ingredient tendencies and our everything-shoved-on-a-sheet-pan ways, no matter how beloved and delicious the results have reliably been. And so I’ve begun reaching for new ideas, new paths, new routes to new pleasures.

What that means in practice is, she’s been shopping differently, and cooking differently, too. She’s found it animating, she wrote, to get out of the groove.

Take eggplant, which she’s been cooking the same way for decades, scorching the skin directly on the grate of her stove, then allowing the black and ruined vegetable rest in a bowl so that it weeps delicious smokiness as its interior steams and softens. Gabrielle ordinarily scoops the collapsed flesh out with a spoon and uses it to serve as a base for dips and spreads, most often framed by bright flavors, or as a side dish for grilled lamb.

But now? She uses it for eggplant croquettes (above) that you might serve as finger food at a cocktail party if you could ever imagine having such a thing, or as a principal dancer in an elegant eggplant Parm that, she concludes, “dissolves on the tongue and stuns your children into loving awe.” I’m doing that this weekend even if it requires an untoward number of steps. I trust the process. I think it’ll jumpstart me. I hope it does you.

Other things to cook this weekend that might reset your brain: I’m thinking grilled paella if you can manage a grill, or a coconut layer cake if you can’t. (Triple points for making both.) Tonight you could cook one of our recipes to celebrate Eid al-Adha, which comes to an end tonight.

It’d be neat to cover a table in reams of newsprint, steam up a bunch of crabs, eat them with leisure or in a frenzy, depending on the heat of the day. You might do similarly with some oven-baked ribs. And I’d love a grapefruit fluff for dessert on Saturday night, whatever I’m cooking. Or a crème brûlée pie! That’d be great as well.

This could be your weekend for Ina Garten’s coquilles St.-Jacques, for Shaun Lewis’s jerk chicken with pickled bananas, for Melissa Clark’s caramelized tomato tarte Tatin. You could bake a peach pie, or spin up some tangerine sherbet, or assemble a pistachio and cherry bombe. Any of those will leave you thrilled and a little breathless, ready for a rejuvenated week of cooking to come.

Thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this weekend are on NYT Cooking. Please subscribe today, if you haven’t already, in order to access them all. Your subscription supports our work and allows it to continue.

We’re here if you need any help along the way. Just write the team at cookingcare@nytimes.com and someone will get back to you with a solution or advice, I promise.

Now, it’s nothing to do with roasted squab or the taste of Bologna on white bread with mayonnaise and raw onion, but I liked reading Ian Frazier in Outside, on the yearn to road-trip, even now.

Our Tina Jordan and Marilyn Stasio teamed up to produce this invaluable guide to Nordic noir, which may come in handy as you plan your weekend reads.

Kind of excited to read “The Anthill,” by Julianne Pachico.

Finally, see what you make of this Laura Poppick story about a Maine seed collector and hisfarm, in Down East. I’ll see you on Sunday.