Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Friday, December 4, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. One of Yewande Komolafe’s holiday traditions is to cook with a brandied fruit mix (above) that her mother learned to make as a young graduate student in Berlin, and brought home to Nigeria when Yewande was a toddler.

“It’s perfectly suited for mixing into a scone recipe before baking, for finishing braised lamb shanks, and for enlivening a cocktail with a lovely spiced citrus bouquet,” Yewande wrote for The Times this week. “But that’s only the beginning. You can also stir the drained fruit into muffin or cake batter, mix it into a rich bread dough, toss it with bulkier fruit as a filling for hand pies, or serve it as an accompaniment to roasts right out of the oven. Whatever it touches, it imparts powerful flavors that are, for me, inseparable from the holidays themselves.”

The mixture needs a couple of weeks to develop its intoxicating complexity, so if you’d like to welcome this tradition into your own holiday plans this year, the time to make it is this weekend, along with whatever else you get up to in the kitchen.

Like, for example, cookies. Melissa Clark dropped some fine new ones this week in her treatise on how to make the perfect holiday cookie box, and you should absolutely get started on making some of them this weekend if you can: honey-roasted peanut thumbprints; sparkly gingerbread; cherry rugelach with cardamom sugar. If ever there were a year for aggressive holiday cookie boxing, it’s this one. We’ll even tell you how to mail them.

Alternatively — or additionally — you might take a look at David Tanis’s new recipes for a luxe little family dinner that could bring you some happiness, at least if you can manage the shopping: a fennel salad with anchovy and olives to start, followed by a cod and mussel stew with harissa and an olive oil walnut cake with pomegranate for dessert. Would that stew work with tautog or halibut in place of the cod? I think so, yes.

Other things to cook this weekend: Suvir Saran’s spicy roasted chicken thighs; a whole mess of Helen You’s pork-and-chive dumplings; Samin Nosrat’s whatever you want soup.

Thousands and thousands more ideas are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go search among them and see what inspires. Then save the recipes you want to cook. (Which, by the way, you can do even if the recipe you want to save doesn’t come from our site. Here’s how to do that.) Rate the recipes you’ve cooked. And leave notes on them, as well, if you’d like to remind yourself of something you’ve improved or substituted, or want to tell the world of your fellow subscribers about it.

Yes, you need to be a subscriber to enjoy all the benefits of the site and apps. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. I hope you will, if you haven’t already, subscribe to NYT Cooking today.

In turn, we will be standing by to help, should you find yourself jammed up in the kitchen or by our technology. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. If not, or if you want to send me a worm or an apple, you can write to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent. (Or you can find me on social media, where I’m @samsifton.)

Now, it’s a far cry from sazón and tapenade, but true crime is just as enjoyable: Here’s Leah McLaren in Toronto Life, on a notorious Canadian con man named Boaz Manor.

Take a look at Kate Retford’s review of Amelia Rauser’s “The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s,” in the London Review of Books. It’s fascinating.

Here’s the Brooklyn duo Overcoats with a Porches remix of their “Apathetic Boys” from earlier this year.

Finally, a reminder that Melissa Clark, Dorie Greenspan, Sohla El-Waylly and Samantha Seneviratne will appear tomorrow in a live online Times event that we’re calling The New York Times Cookie Swap. It’s at 11 a.m., Eastern time, and you can RSVP here. I hope you do. It should be a fun session. Please join us and I’ll see you on Sunday.