Go for the gold: What to Cook This Week

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Photograph by Grant Cornett. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Theo Vamvounakis.

Sunday, August 9, 2020

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. You know what’s a good thing to cook on a Sunday afternoon? Meera Sodha’s chicken curry (above), which her mom taught her to make, and her naan to go with it, which her aunt taught her to make. I like to make some raita as well. We’ve got a fine recipe for hot mango chutney, too, but I’ll use store-bought. I’m not looking for projects at the end of the weekend, just comfort and deliciousness. I want to eat early, and then go binge “Queen Sugar” for a while. Will you join me?

That’s today sorted. On Monday, I’m thinking you could put together this marinated celery salad with chickpeas and Parmesan. Or if celery’s not your thing, these seared scallops with jammy cherry tomatoes.

Tuesday looks good for pressure-cooker ribollita, with smoked mozzarella toasts. Or simply mozzarella toasts, if you don’t have the smoked variety on hand. The pandemic continues to swirl. Cook with what you have. (The other night, I made a meat sauce with ground beef, garlic, sesame oil, peanut butter, chile crisp, soy sauce and a little water, then served it over leftover cold rice noodles with a lot of scallions and cilantro, a no-recipe recipe for the win.)

Take your lunch hour or whenever you eat lunch on Wednesday to make gazpacho so it’s icy cold by dinner. Eat that outside on the porch or fire escape, on the stoop or roof, in the garage with the door open, wherever you can.

Thursday, a summer casserole: Pick one of these 17 recipes, and go to.

And then you can slide into the weekend with this marvelous shrimp Bolognese or, if you prefer, on a pita wrapped around Australian-style pork gyros.

There are thousands and thousands more recipes to consider cooking this week waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go browse among them as you used to do at malls, looking for holiday gifts. Yes, you’ll need a subscription to access them all, and to use all of the features on our site and apps. So if you haven’t already, I hope you’ll consider subscribing today. Your subscriptions support our work. Thanks so much.

We’ll be standing by, in case anything goes wrong with your cooking or our technology. Just write cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise — and if they don’t you can always yell at me. I’m at foodeditor@nytimes.com, and I read every letter sent.

Now, it’s a very long distance from tea-smoked goose and huckleberry jam, but it’s the correct season to read Eric Jay Dolin’s “A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes.” (Elizabeth Kolbert reviewed it for The Times.)

I liked this Daniel Howe story in National Parks magazine about a 2019 reunion of men, including Howe, who hiked the length of the Appalachian Trail in 1979, and how those trips changed their lives.

Have you listened to Kevin Roose’s “Rabbit Hole” podcast, on The Times? Y’oughta. It’s about what the internet is doing to us.

Finally, let’s cue up Wizkid to play us off, “Joro.” Music to make cook by. I’ll be back on Monday.