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, August 14, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Dorie Greenspan is back in The Times this week with a fantastic recipe for raspberry ice cream and magic-shell chocolate sauce (above) that I think you may want to use as the foundation for your weekend cooking plans. Dorie being Dorie, which is to say a much better maker of desserts than your average person, the ice cream recipe is slightly different from ones that you may have used before.

For instance, her velvety-soft ice cream does not arise from an egg custard base, but instead from an eggless, Philadelphia-style one made with powdered milk, honey and vodka. The milk powder adds body and heft, and the honey makes everything smooth. As for the vodka, it lowers the freezing point of the ice cream, making it easier to scoop. (Not to mention, it helps keep the raspberries from running.)

To go with and on top, Dorie makes a magic shell mixture of dark chocolate melted with a little coconut oil. She adds a little of that to the ice cream at the end of its churn, to add streaks and flakes, and saves the rest to spoon over the scoops when she serves. You’ll be making both those things until the first frost.

What to serve before dessert? I’d stay super summery, perhaps with Clare de Boer’s grilled chicken skewers with tarragon and yogurt, or my barbecued chicken. Maybe fried scallops and a log pile of buttery corn on the cob? I could see this weekend shaping up as a good one for grilled rib-eyes with watercress and a freestyle take on the tomato and onion salad they serve at Peter Luger: thick planks of juicy tomato shingled with thick planks of white onion, with steak sauce to drizzle over the top.

Other things to cook this weekend, before ice cream or not: a salad of tomatoes, fresh figs and blue cheese; pork meatballs with ginger and fish sauce; avocado salad with herbs and capers; loaded nachos, always and forever. And don’t forget berries for breakfast, this weekend in the form of skillet berry and brown butter toast crumble. That’s delicious.

Many thousands more recipes you might cook this weekend or in coming days are on NYT Cooking. Go browse among them. It’s true that you need a subscription to access them all, and to use the features of our site and apps. But we think it’s worth the scratch, and we know that it supports our work and allows it to continue. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll think about subscribing today. Thanks so much.

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Now, it’s a far cry from turkey breasts and summer savory, but the writer Roger Angell turns 100 next week and that’s worth celebrating. Last week the Friend Memorial Public Library in Brooklin, Maine, where Angell lives, organized Roger Angell Day in his honor. The library’s website has some nice links to his work. Check those out.

The writer Anand Giridharadas has a newsletter now, on money and power, culture and politics. It’s called The. Ink. He’s smart and funny. Get in on the ground floor and subscribe. (It’s free though you can pay for more access, which sounds familiar, no?)

I liked this virtual trip to Cape Cod in The Times, where the photographer and writer Randy Harris went to document the lives of oyster farmers in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

Soundtrack suggestion: The Moroccan trap collective NAAR, here with “Kssiri,” from 2019, le flow extraordinaire.

Finally, some housekeeping: This is my last newsletter for a while. I’m heading off the grid to recharge, to read and fish and cook in the absence of screens and people. My friends and colleagues Tejal Rao and Julia Moskin will write to you during my absence. I hope you’ll find them as kind and delightful and filled with great ideas and observations as I do. I’ll be back in September. I miss you already.