Go for the gold: What to Cook Right Now

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Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

Monday, July 20, 2020

What to Cook Right Now

Sam Sifton

Good morning. My pal Ricky turned me on to a breakfast sandwich of the sort I used to order in delis or bodegas or bagel shops, back when I frequented them daily: toasted sesame bagel with butter and Swiss cheese. That’s a great sandwich: simple, salty, vaguely sweet, with a tang from the cheese. If you ask for it with ham, stipulate one slice only. Any more than that, and it’s a lunch sandwich, better consumed with mayonnaise and mustard, sliced pickles, a side of chips.

I mention it here because while you may not be ordering sandwiches at delis or bodegas or bagel shops these days, you may still be eating sandwiches, ones that you’ve made at home. And while there are rules to making them properly, only one of them truly matters. It is this: When spreading butter or mayonnaise or mustard, make sure to spread it wall to wall, so that there is even and total coverage.

Let’s practice that this week. You can do so with the ham and cheese above, with a bologna and sliced onion (good with a glass of milk!), with a roast beef with Cheddar or with Melissa Clark’s recipe for tomato sandwiches (above), which call for you to rub garlic and tomato onto the bread, wall to wall, of course, before applying the mayonnaise, same.

But don’t just make sandwiches. (Though if you must, do use this incredible chicken salad on one of them.) There’s also this one-pot spaghetti with cherry tomatoes and kale to try — we call that Tommy Kale in our house, a homage to the director of “Hamilton” and “Fosse/Verdon,” Tommy Kail. Not to mention, there’s sheet-pan fish with chard and spicy red pepper relish.

You could make a carrot tart with ricotta and feta this week, or cheese pupusas with curtido. You could make all of that.

And you should definitely bake as well, and in particular this giant chocolate and peanut butter cookie, essentially a mammoth, sliceable Girl Scout cookie, and a beacon of joy.

There are thousands more recipes to cook this week awaiting you on NYT Cooking. Yes, you need a subscription to access all of them, and to access all the features on our site and apps. If you haven’t done so already, I hope you will think about subscribing today. Subscriptions support this work we love to do. They allow it to continue.

We are standing by to help if something goes awry along the way, either with your cooking or our technology. Just write us at cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.

Now, it’s a few football fields from duck breasts and green coriander seeds, but William Atkins’s Letter from Ireland in Harper’s, about climate change and the peat industry, makes for wildly fascinating reading.

Speaking of which, so does Namwali Serpell on Sun Ra, in The New York Review of Books. (Here’s Sun Ra live at Montreux in 1976, “Take the A Train.”)

Here’s Rick Bragg on a dog he loved, in Garden & Gun.

Finally, to play us off, New Order, “Blue Monday.” That’ll get you going. I’ll be back on Wednesday.