Go for the gold: What to Cook This Week

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Kate Mathis for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Eugene Jho.

Sunday, July 19, 2020

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Family meal is what restaurant people call the dinner served to the staff before service, which is the term they use to describe when the restaurant is open to customers. Family meals are generally made by a line cook, someone who works a particular station in the kitchen — the grill, say, or the stove. A line cook is not the restaurant’s chef, but answers to one or to the chef’s lieutenant, who is known as a sous chef. This is all in keeping with the system by which the French first organized the professional kitchen: a brigade de cuisine.

The line cook doesn’t so much shop for ingredients for a family meal as scrounges for them, as so many of us are doing at home ourselves these days. We don’t have walk-in refrigerators where we might find a half-empty tub of potatoes about to sprout eyes, nor salmon carcasses out of which we might make soup. But you may have celery you bought on a rare supermarket run 10 days ago, or those cans of beans and tuna from the early days of the lockdown, that big bag of rice, a few heels of Parmesan, a half-bunch of parsley and a couple of softening lemons, a goodly number of chicken thighs in the freezer, something.

I’m here to tell you: You can make a meal out of that. You’re not on a competition show. You don’t have to use everything. You just need to cook. And that’s where NYT Cooking comes in and why, this Sunday night, I’ll be serving chicken and rice soup with celery, parsley and lemon (above) in my home, where I’m not a line cook nor a chef, just a loving provider, trying to make what’s available into something delicious for my family’s meal.

On Monday, how about a chickpea salad with fresh (well, nearly) herbs and scallions? Or farro e pepe?

Tuesday, I’m thinking, might be good for this coconut-miso salmon curry.

A creamy one-pot pasta with chicken and mushrooms on Wednesday? Sure. Though you could always roast a chicken instead, have it with braised greens and crispy Parmesan potatoes, enjoy some Rice Krispies treats with chocolate and pretzels for dessert.

Crispy tofu with cashews and blistered snap peas for Thursday night? I think so, yes.

And then you can round out the week with swordfish piccata, a dish that teaches the fundamentals of pan sauce well. As Gabrielle Hamilton notes in the recipe, it’s the highest-yielding kitchen lesson you can get in 25 minutes: how to use high heat at the start to sear the fish and develop a fond; how to use reduced heat when you add acidity to the sauce, allowing the flavor to build; and how to use residual heat with the burner off to whisk in cold butter to bring the sauce together in a beautiful, emulsified whole. That’s a nice start to the weekend.

There are thousands more recipes to cook this week waiting for you on NYT Cooking. You do need a subscription to access all of them, to save and share them, to leave notes and ratings on them, even to add recipes from sites that aren’t from The Times to your recipe box (here’s how to do that). If you haven’t already, I hope you will think about subscribing today. Subscriptions support our work. They allow it to continue.

And we’ll be here to help if something goes awry along the way, either with your work in the kitchen or our work in the recipes or the code. Just write the team: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise.

Now, it’s nothing to do with cookies or salad, but with so many of us still stuck inside all day staring out at brick walls or trees, sidewalks, harbors or hills, it’s cool to see what other people are seeing out of their own windows, all over the world. Window Swap allows you to see what strangers see, and to share what you see as well. Check it out.

This week’s novel? “The City We Became,” by N.K. Jemisin.

Finally, it is the birthday of the poet Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, born in 1875. Here’s her “Sonnet,” published in 1922. Read that and I’ll be back on Monday.