Go for the gold: What to Cook This Week

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Bryan Gardner for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

Sunday, September 27, 2020

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. The fishing guides are in Montauk for the season, cooped up in motel rooms, garage apartments, R.V.s, the cabs of their trucks at the inlet, all of them waiting on the tide, the wind, their clients, some auspicious combination that will allow them to get out on the water and in the presence of fish.

They’re on 7-Eleven diets, smoking too much, nervous about the weather, worried about gear, filled with existential dread and phenomenal confidence combined. There will be fine hangouts in marina parking lots at the end of the days, distanced barbecues outside the motels, lots of friendships renewed. But it’s different on the water in the midst of this fall run, all that striped bass, false albacore, bonito and bluefish, boats like bumper cars on the swell. Everybody hates everybody. There’s nothing better in the world.

Of course there’s a food angle, if you want to head to the fishmonger today: smoked bluefish pâté; quick Vietnamese-style caramel bluefish; tuna poke. (I haven’t killed or bought striped bass in at least five years. They’re worth more in the water. And false albacore is nasty meat.) Won’t you make one of those bluefish or tuna recipes for dinner tonight? It’ll be fun. We’ll tell fish stories.

So that’s Sunday, if you’ll join me. I think Monday would be ace for an heirloom tomato tart (above), likely one of the last of the year, or for a shredded tofu and shiitake stir-fry.

For dinner on Tuesday, I like this Sri Lankan dal with coconut and lime kale, which came to The Times in a Tejal Rao article about the British cookbook writer Meera Sodha.

And then another clever take on a crab boil from Millie Peartree for Wednesday night: crab and shrimp boil pasta, like a fish shack fever dream.

Sizzling pork tacos for Thursday, courtesy of David Tanis. As one of our community wrote in a note below the recipe, “These. Are. Awesome.”

And then, to round out the week, try this fine roasted salmon with fennel and lime, slow and elegant, a luxurious meal for a difficult time.

Thousands and thousands more recipes you might consider cooking this week are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go take a look around and see what grabs your fancy. Save the recipes you like. Rate the ones you’ve cooked and, if you’d like, leave notes on them for yourself or others. Learn to make pancakes! It’s a whole scene we’ve got going over there. (Yes, you need a subscription. Subscriptions support our work. Please consider, if you haven’t already, subscribing today.)

And we’ll be standing by, as always, to lend a hand if you get into trouble in the kitchen or on your device. Write us: cookingcare@nytimes.com. I promise someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s a far cry from roasted squab and weeknight casseroles, but this accounting of a cheating scandal in professional poker, by Brendan I. Koerner in Wired, is absolutely bananas. Please read.

Have you seen any of the “viral musicals” that The 24 Hour Plays has been producing? Here’s “This One Thing Will Get You Through 2020,” with music and lyrics by Emily Gardner Xu Hall and book by Isabella Dawis, performed by Brittany O’Grady.

The chef Willin Low took me to Roxy Laksa in Singapore a few years ago and there are days when all I want to do is to be there again, slurping away.

Finally, Melissa Kirsch wrote recently about “Sounds of the Forest,” a map project that allows you to explore the world through sound. Have some fun with that, and I’ll be back on Monday.