Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

View in Browser

Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book.

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Friday, July 3, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. There’s a little convenience store attached to the gas station down the street from where I stay and, if you get there early enough, just after the sun makes its appearance in the eastern sky, it’s possible to obtain one of the six or seven egg sandwiches the cashier makes every morning before unlocking the door. They sit on a shelf by the register, in front of a new plexiglass shield, hot in their foil jackets, soft and salty within, a $4 treat on a day that won’t yield many of them.

I think of these sandwiches in the way people used to think of off-menu secret burgers or fried chicken sandwiches or bowls of pho at luxe restaurants in Manhattan, available only at certain times, in extremely limited numbers, for those in the know. The cashier does good work on the electric griddle in the back of the store. There’s a thrill to securing one of her sandwiches, which tastes all the more delicious for the difficulty in obtaining it.

Lately, I’ve been making them at home, myself, a no-recipe breakfast recipe worth trying out: warmed but untoasted Kaiser rolls spread with salted butter, with an egg over easy, a few slices of cheese, a spray of black pepper and a dab of ketchup. I wrap the sandwich in foil while I’m making tea and reading the front page of the newspaper. By the time I’m ready to turn to the jumps of the stories, the thing has come together into a steaming warm whole, a perfect sandwich for one of those days you want to start with a savory balm.

On other days, though, and perhaps especially on the weekend, what I crave is sweet. Dorie Greenspan has a fantastic new recipe right in that lane, for a big, flaky blueberry scone she learned from the restaurateur Joanne Chang, to delight the senses and concentrate the mind.

“Those of us who bake through challenges as well as celebrations know the comfort of the craft,” she wrote for The Times this week. “We know that when everything is spinning wildly, we can count on butter, flour, sugar and eggs. We can transform them. We can make something satisfying, and we can share it. For so many of us, baking is a respite and often a refuge.”

What a nice thing to do on a long weekend, no? You could make a flag cake to celebrate the national holiday! Or a peach upside-down cake. A summer berry buckle (above) or Atlantic Beach pie. Watch the hours fly by and deliver deliciousness and delight.

Other things to cook for the holiday or this weekend just because: barbecue chicken; lemon potato salad with mint; grilled romaine; the chef Millie Peartree’s macaroni and cheese; jerk chicken with pickled bananas; lalla mussa dal; Jamie Oliver’s vegetarian black bean burgers; vegan queso and chips.

Explore a little! Many thousands more recipes to cook this weekend await you on NYT Cooking, along with tools to help you sort and organize them. (Did you know you can save recipes from other websites to your recipe box? Here’s how.) If you haven’t already, I hope you will consider subscribing to our site and apps so that you can access all that we have. Your subscriptions support our work.

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

Now, it’s a far cry from grapes and all-purpose flour, but you should read Justice B. Hill in The Undefeated, writing about Oscar Charleston, the brightest star of the inaugural season of the Negro Leagues, 100 years ago this year.

Joe Coscarelli’s “Diary of a Song,” in The Times, is one of my favorite new story forms in modern journalism. For this one, he dives into “Big Drip” by Fivio Foreign, a Brooklyn drill anthem that’s a good candidate for New York’s song of the summer.

Here’s the TikTok star Tabitha Brown, “TikTok’s Mom,” who recently “visited” NYT Cooking via video.

Finally, here’s Dwight Garner on “The Lehman Trilogy,” by Stefano Massini, translated by Richard Dixon. A 700-page play about the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers? I’ve got the time. Let’s go! See you on Sunday.