Go for the gold: What to Cook This Week

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Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Susan Spungen. Prop Stylist: Paige Hicks.

Sunday, November 29, 2020

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. The eggnog’s flowing where I stay, garlands rising, Christmas music playing, all the markers of holiday cheer. It’s a little out of character. But we’re building a bulwark against the strangeness of 2020, maybe? We’re anyway re-nesting in a nest that’s been largely the same since March. It’s been nice. And with Thanksgiving behind us, we’re baking like mad.

I’ve got a black cake going. We’re assembling collections of stamped citrus shortbread cookies (above) and peppermint stripe cookies for gifts to mail, baking peanut butter-miso cookies to eat on the couch with mugs of chai. And have you seen this Yewande Komolafe recipe for lane cake? Oh, man. I think we might make that, too.

It’d be nice if there were room in the oven today for this caramelized onion galette. That and some leftover turkey would make for a fine dinner this evening. And when it’s done, I’ll pop some pork chops in brine, so I can have cider-cured pork chops for dinner on Tuesday night, under an easy hacked Bordelaise sauce.

Monday night, how about spaghetti al limone? I like that plain, and I love it topped with sautéed shrimp.

Tuesday’s for those pork chops. Caramelize some onions — in fact, if you plan ahead, you can caramelize extra when you make the onion galette, and store them in the fridge until you’re ready to use them here — along with a sliced-up apple to serve with the chops and the sauce. In the restaurant I run in my head, that special always sells out.

On Wednesday night, I like the ease of this baked risotto with peas and greens, and would serve it with a mound of mushrooms cooked down in butter, with a lot of salt and black pepper.

For Thursday, Thanksgiving now a week in the past, I’ll retire the turkey carcass to the stockpot and use the evening’s broth to make a version of red beans and rice, using canned beans (Pableaux forgive me!) because it’s the middle of the week.

And on Friday, I’ll suggest these fish tacos. Or these fish tacos. Or maybe you could make these buttery kimchi shrimp? That’d be a nice Friday night feed.

There are thousands and thousands more recipes to think about cooking this week waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go take a look at them and see what you find. You can save the recipes you want to cook. You should rate the ones you’ve made. You might leave notes on them, too, if you’ve come up with a good hack or substitution you’d like to share.

Of course, you’ll need a subscription to the site and apps to do all that. Subscriptions are what make this whole enterprise possible. I hope if you haven’t already that you will subscribe to NYT Cooking today.

Please get in touch with us if you need any help along the way, either with the paperwork or your cooking. We are at cookingcare@nytimes.com, and someone will get back to you, I promise. You can also write me at foodeditor@nytimes.com, particularly if you’re really mad about something, or pleased.

Now, let’s stick with cookies for a moment. On Saturday at 11 a.m. Eastern time, Melissa Clark, Dorie Greenspan, Sohla El-Waylly and Samantha Seneviratne will appear in a live, online Times event that we’re calling The New York Times Cookie Swap. You can R.S.V.P. here, and I hope that you do. It should be a fun session. Please join us.

It’s nothing to do with sprinkles or almond flour, but here’s Phoebe Bridgers with a cover of Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December.”

You should read Ligaya Mishan on gout, in T, really you should. She’s such a beautiful writer.

Finally, watching this, I found myself in the same spaced-out state I might have secured had I just checked into a hotel in Tbilisi, collapsed on the bed and turned on the TV: “Georgia’s Got Talent” 2020, with the illusionist Levan Grigolia. Let that all wash over you. We can travel in our minds. I’ll be back on Monday.