Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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Craig Lee for The New York Times

Friday, July 10, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. If I could, I’d load up my vehicle and drive to Southern California right now, sleep in the truck bed in national parks and Walmart parking lots along the way, cook on a camp fire or a little propane stove, take some hikes, make an adventure out of it, give the children something to remember from this summer that isn’t masks, boredom and “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”

But that’s not going to happen. Partly that’s because of the pandemic. I don’t want to be on the road. But it’s also not going to happen for the same reason I don’t have chickens and a vegetable garden, for the same reason I haven’t been canning jams and pickles or oil-poached salmon. I admire the people who do all of those things. But I just can’t muster the energy right now. (The coronavirus has upended our schedules as much as our lives.) The fantasies are muscular enough that they can survive my lassitude, though. I can imagine them real as houses, even if I don’t act on them this summer. My oil-poached tuna is incredible, in my mind. My chickens give me so many eggs.

But I can make fish tacos (above) this weekend, and will. I can make the cheater’s pickles Kim Severson learned from the Savannah chef Dora Charles. I can make the barbecue chicken pizza Tejal Rao conjured out of her childhood memories of California Pizza Kitchen at the mall. I don’t need to put up salmon. I can dice it for salmon burgers and cook them fast on a plancha on the grill.

If I want to get a little project-y, I could make Melissa Clark’s sous vide rib steaks with a spicy salsa verde, or Grant Melton’s buttermilk banana pudding with salted peanuts. I could make beef empanadas or jollof rice or head once more unto the breach, for a run at a better sourdough boule. I could make perfect black and white cookies, the iconic cookie of the city of my birth.

There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this weekend waiting for you on NYT Cooking, at least once you have taken out a subscription to our site and apps. (If you haven’t done that already, I hope you will think about subscribing today. Your subscription is important. It allows our work to continue.)

And we’ll be standing by to help if anything goes wrong along the way, either with your work in the kitchen or ours in the code. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com for assistance. We will get back to you, I promise.

Now, I wrote about tuna salad sandwiches on Monday and it turns out a lot of people have opinions about those. I got a lot of mail, a lot of it running to Worcestershire sauce is mandatory, or You have to add capers. One letter had a link to a classic old Ron Rosenbaum profile of Roy Cohn that ran in Manhattan Inc. in November, 1984, in which tuna salad plays a supporting role. It’s worth reading.

The Times’s Food section has a strong collection of stories out of Minnesota this week. Mecca Bos wrote about Minneapolis’s robust food scene and how few Black-owned businesses are in it. (Robert Simonson wrote about one of them, Du Nord Craft Spirits.) And Brett Anderson wrote about a couple who left the city for a small community in the center of the state, where they’re using their restaurant, bakery and farm as a way to promote racial justice.

It is the birthday of the painter Camille Pissarro, born on the island of St. Thomas on this day in 1830. (He died in 1903.) Let’s look at his painting, “The Pork Butcher,” made in 1883. Nice charcuterie!

Finally, and nothing to do with pate or tuna, please meet Michaela Coel, the showrunner, writer, director and star of the HBO series, “I May Destroy You,” profiled in Vulture by E. Alex Jung. I’ll see you on Sunday.