Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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Photograph by Heami Lee Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Rebecca Bartoshesky.

Friday, October 23, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Dorie Greenspan has a lovely piece in The Times this week, reminiscing about her time working with Julia Child on her “Baking With Julia” cookbook. It recalls the tuna salad sandwich (above) that Child used to make and serve for lunch, simple and delicious.

Here’s Dorie: “It was a great sandwich, full of unexpected flavors. There was sharpness from lemon juice and kick from salty capers and cornichons, those tiny French pickles packed in a brine that goes strong on vinegar. There was crunch from onion and (beautifully) chopped celery. Chez Julia, the tuna was packed in oil, and the mayonnaise was always Hellmann’s. There was salt and pepper, freshly ground and preferably white — Julia held that when the color of the food was light, the pepper should be white. There was always lettuce, usually a soft lettuce, rounds of tomato and sometimes more onion (Vidalia was her first choice). Closed sandwiches were on Pepperidge Farm white bread; open-faced on Bays English muffins.”

Doesn’t that sound perfect? I hope we all make tuna salad sandwiches this weekend, and raise a glass to both women when we do.

I hope, too, that you’ll be able to take some time this weekend for cooking something new and exciting, something of a project, something to take your mind off the endless thrum of news, the drumbeat of worry about the pandemic, the strangeness of our lives right now.

That might be these pumpkin blondies with chocolate and pecans. It might be this beef stew with prunes. Maybe it’s fluffy Cheddar biscuits, excellent with a bowl of chili, or with a drift of sausage gravy. Is lobster stew with a pastry lid in the cards? I hope so, for some of you.

You might make a tater tot casserole, for the pleasure it’ll engender, for the sheer deliciousness of it. Or a barbecue chicken pizza, same.

I like the idea of a weekend apple pie, specifically Melissa Clark’s double apple pie. Also, these kitchen sink cookies. And these roasted chicken thighs with peanut butter barbecue sauce.

Thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this weekend await you on NYT Cooking. Go see what you find. Save the recipes you’d like to cook. Rate them after you’ve cooked them. And feel free to leave notes on them, as well, if you have hacks or substitutions to suggest. It’s true you need a subscription to do all that, including browsing around the site. Subscriptions support the work that we do and allow it to continue. So if you haven’t subscribed already, I hope you will think about subscribing today. Thanks.

And we’ll be here, if anything goes sideways while you’re cooking or using our site and apps. Just write cookingcare@nytimes.com and tell us what’s up. We’ll get back to you, I promise.

Now, it’s nothing to do with arroz con gandules or potted shrimp, but I’m thrilling to Richard Zacks’s biography of Capt. William Kidd, “The Pirate Hunter.”

If you’re missing the Rialto and the gossipy stories that swirl through its theaters and dressing rooms, do take a whirl through Michael Riedel’s latest for Vanity Fair, an excerpt from his “Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway,” out next month.

Here’s a new poem by Ange Mlinko, “Naples, Florida,” in The New York Review of Books.

Finally, here’s Jeff Buckley live on BBC2’s “The Late Show” in 1995, with “Grace.” The presenter at the top’s not necessary if you know who Buckley was, just forward through it. Either way, though, aspire to do whatever it is you do the way Buckley sang and you’ll be in a good place. See you on Sunday.