Go for the gold: What to Cook This Week

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Craig Lee for The New York Times

Sunday, August 2, 2020

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Life during the pandemic offers its pleasures only fitfully, but there’s a good tomato getting ready for harvest on my solitary compound-bucketed plant and I’ve been looking forward to it all week. I’m planning on eating it sun-warm and cut into shingles between slices of toast, with a little salt and a bunch of mayonnaise. That’s summer’s greatest sandwich. I can almost taste it now.

Later I’ll turn to fried fish, which if you’re lucky you can cook outside, in a cast-iron pan on the grill, then eat it with hot sauce, quick-pickled okra and a thatch of coleslaw. There’ll be Jennifer Steinhauer’s Field Day poundcake (above) for dessert, because one of the kids is working her way through all our poundcake recipes and today is Jenny’s turn.

It’s shaping up to be an excellent Sunday. I hope that proves true for you as well.

On Monday, speaking just for myself but always in service to you, I’ll look to a white bean caprese salad, if I don’t make baked tofu with peanut sauce and coconut lime rice yet again. That’s a rut I don’t mind occupying, to cook that meal so much.

Tuesday might bring roasted chicken thighs with peaches, basil and ginger, if I can find good peaches, and stew chicken if I can’t. (Stew chicken makes for excellent leftovers.)

Tomato risotto on Wednesday sounds good, even if I have to use store-bought tomatoes to save my crop for lunches.

For Thursday, maybe we could all take a run at pork meatballs with ginger and fish sauce? Or spaghetti carbonara? Depending on the weather, it could be time for ice-cold schav, a righteous thing to eat in the heat.

And then to finish the week, I’m thinking my pal Pong’s favorite recipe, for miso-glazed fish. I like that dish with rice and greens sautéed with plenty of garlic and ginger.

There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this week on NYT Cooking. Yes, you need a subscription to access all of them, and to use all the features of our site and apps. That makes sense. We’re a subscription business. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. If you haven’t already, will you please subscribe today?

We’ll be standing by to help if something goes wrong along the way, either with your cooking or our technology. Just write us: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, will you take a look at our latest video offering on YouTube, where Aaron Hutcherson takes up the Cook My Life challenge?

It’s nothing to do with skirt steaks or patty pan squash, but you will not regret watching this video of the skateboarder Isamu Yamamoto at work.

Nor will you be annoyed that I urged you to read Janet Maslin on “The Essential Tana French.” There’s your summer reading list, done.

Here’s Stephen Marche in the Literary Review of Canada, writing about the Canadian passport, but really about Canada itself, “nurturing and oppressive with the same gesture, safe and claustrophobic in its enclosure.” (Related: Megan Specia in The Times, on the erosion of American passport privilege.)

Finally, Sunday music to play us off, Khruangbin, “Pelota.” I’ll be back on Monday.