Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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

Friday, July 17, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. “For months now, the garden has been the only place I can reliably find any solace,” Samin Nosrat wrote for The Times this week, in a column devoted to the vegetables and herbs she’s been growing since shelter-in-place orders were imposed in Oakland, Calif., where she lives.

“As days and dates became increasingly meaningless,” she continued, “I learned to measure the passage of time by counting the number of leaves on a seedling, watching the sunlight hours extend little by little or noticing the growth of rhubarb stalks as they cracked through the winter soil.” And then the bounty: squash blossoms, runner beans, lemon verbena, sage and, among all the rest, her favorite produce, fresh green coriander seeds.

These she used with fish sauce, ginger, garlic, chiles and coriander itself to create a kind of Southeast Asian compound butter (above) to slather over grilled corn. Do that yourself this weekend even if you don’t have bolted coriander to harvest and have to use store-bought instead. It’s a taste of summer happiness from someone deeply kind to share.

What else to make this weekend? Julia Moskin’s best gazpacho, for sure. The chicken salad you used to be able to get at Freds, inside Barneys New York, haute cuisine for the sort of people who ate at Freds. (At home, you can imagine yourself eating it on vacation somewhere luxe.)

Heading in a different direction entirely, you might make sloppy Joes. Or Tama Matsuoka Wong’s Vietnamese summer rolls with a black bean and garlic dipping sauce, which Elaine Louie brought to The Times in 2012. You could brine some fish for the grill (or the oven or sauté pan, as you like). You could make like our Vaughn Vreeland, and make Marcella Hazan’s Bolognese sauce — a joyous task he brought alive on our YouTube channel this week. You could make a strawberry gingersnap icebox cake.

Me, whatever happens, I’d like to have a feast on the grill: corn for Samin’s compound butter; broccoli; some sausages, onions and peppers; burgers; peaches; watermelon.

There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this weekend waiting for you on NYT Cooking. You do need a subscription to access all of them. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. So I hope you will think about subscribing today.

Of course, we’ll be here to help if something goes wrong while you’re cooking or using our site or apps. Just write us: cookingcare@nytimes.com. I promise someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s a far cry from planting tomatoes and hook neck squash, but Keith Thomas writing about bodily odors in the London Review of Books is pretty great.

Um, yes, I am going to read “Liberty: Life, Billy and the Pursuit of Happiness,” by Liberty DeVitto, Billy Joel’s longtime drummer. It’s out today.

Stephen Sondheim teaching “Send In the Clowns” way back when is just great, and a reminder of what a brilliant instructor he is, among so much else.

Finally, being at home so much these days has got me back into the cracked paperbacks on the shelf where I put them years ago. Here’s the start of Charles Willeford’s 1984 novel “Miami Blues,” which, if you’ve seen only the movie you ought to track down this weekend as well:

Frederick J. Frenger, Jr., a blithe psychopath from California, asked the flight attendant in first class for another glass of champagne and some writing materials. She brought him a cold half-bottle, uncorked it and left it with him, and returned a few moments later with some Pan Am writing paper and a white ball point pen. For the next hour, as he sipped champagne, Freddy practiced writing the signatures of Claude L. Bytell, Ramon Mendez, and Herman T. Gotlieb.

I’m not getting off the couch until I’m done with that. See you on Sunday.