Go for the gold: Cooking With Confidence

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David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Cooking With Confidence

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Tejal Rao has a marvelous story in The Times this week about how restaurant cooks have taken to their home kitchens — and to Instagram — to survive during the pandemic, making small-batch meals to sell to customers, pop-up restaurant style. The food’s exciting, Tejal reports — “revitalizing and intimate,” in her words — and a good reminder that creativity cannot be stifled by the coronavirus, that culture continues to bubble along, that art is out there always.

There’s a confidence to the cooks Tejal interviewed. They’re proud of their craft, of the food they’re selling, and it occurred to me, reading about them, that cooking can and should satisfy and delight these days, after so many months of cooking so often, of honing our skills. You don’t need some towering sourdough boule to achieve that. You can just cook, simply and well, and marvel at how good it makes you and others feel.

Try your hand, for example, at this chicken and mushroom juk with scallion sauce (above), clear and comforting. Or these marvelous porchetta pork chops, brawny and flavorful. Make a bowl of creamy vegan tofu noodles, or a brace of French onion grilled cheese sandwiches.

You don’t even need a recipe to unlock fulfillment. You can go to the market and wait for a muse. I did that and came home with a few dozen cherrystone clams. I steamed them open in just a little water, then dipped them in brown butter I had stained with sweet and fiery habanero sauce. I washed it all down with clam stock, then mopped the bowl with a heel of lard bread I had lying around. This was maybe the best thing I’d cooked in a month: pure flavor, the ingredients barely touched.

You may end up feeling the same way if you make this vinegar chicken, or this kale and quinoa salad with tofu and miso. Swap in some frozen wild blueberries and you could make these muffins some morning to remind you of summer. Sweet potatoes with tahini butter? You may find yourself wondering if you could make those at scale, start a pop-up of your own, delight the neighborhood.

Here’s a pan-seared steak with red wine sauce you’d be happy to eat once a week at your neighborhood bistro. But you made it yourself. Here’s vegetarian kofta curry. And dan dan noodles. Please make salmon burgers some time. You’ll love yourself for them.

There are thousands and thousands more recipes just like that waiting for you on NYT Cooking, recipes to make you feel proud. Go browse and see what you discover. Save the recipes you like. Rate the recipes you’ve cooked. And leave notes on them, if you’ve discovered something about them that you’d like to remember or alert to your fellow subscribers.

Yes, you do need to be a subscriber to do all that. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. I hope, if you haven’t already, that you will subscribe to NYT Cooking today. Thanks.

We are here to help should something go wrong along the way. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise.

Now, it’s a far cry from beignets and crudo, but please read Laura Beil in Texas Monthly, on Martha Josey: rodeo royalty, a five-decade barrel racing star.

There’s a dark and excellent new short story by Lauren Groff in The New Yorker, “The Wind.”

Will you take some time to listen to Billie Eilish and Rosalía’s new collaboration, “Lo Vas A Olvidar?” (I hope so!)

Finally, in The Times, I learned a lot from Jason Farago’s examination of the Frank Auerbach show at Luhring Augustine in New York. Hope you do, too. I’ll be back on Friday.