Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Rebecca Jurkevich.

Friday, January 15, 2021

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Two weeks into 2021 and circus music’s playing everywhere. You’d be forgiven if all you wanted to do this weekend was cook a crispy Parmesan roast chicken with lemon (above), stretch it into sandwiches the next day, then make the bones into a nice stock for soup. You could pair the chicken with a bowl of buttered pasta and some sautéed spinach, then escape into the world of a book for a while — I’m in Beartown, myself, with Fredrik Backman’s “Us Against You.” These are hard days we’re going through. There’s much to be said for the simplicity of a roasted chicken.

But I’m still going to try to sell you on Gabrielle Hamilton’s new recipe for tripe. It’s rich and slurpy and spicy and unctuous and awesome, and I think the time for you to make it is now. As Gabrielle notes in an article she wrote for The Times this week, there’s a fair amount of beautiful honeycomb tripe showing up in our supermarket meat departments just now, perhaps because restaurants aren’t buying the stuff, perhaps because people are looking for cheap cuts of protein, perhaps because American tastes are at long last turning toward the offal much of the world turns into deliciousness.

Let’s take advantage of that this weekend. Let’s cook tripe just as if we were making chili or sourdough bread. Document your work! Tag us on social media. #tripe!

Other recipes I’d like to cook over the course of this long weekend include rice noodles with garlicky cashew sauce, cheese grits with saucy black beans, avocado and radish and French toast amandine.

I could throw down a lamb biryani, absolutely, or maybe this creamy farro with crispy mushrooms and sour cream. Want another chili? Here’s a strong ground beef chili, with chocolate and peanut butter. Or perhaps you’d prefer a broccoli salad with Cheddar and warm bacon vinaigrette?

Many thousands more recipes to cook this weekend are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go take a look around and see what you find. Save the recipes you like. Rate the ones you’ve made. And you can leave notes on the recipes, too, if you’d like to remember something you’ve changed or share your findings with your fellow subscribers.

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Now, it has precious little to do with sweetbreads or salt pork, but I’ve never seen a gannet on land, so I particularly liked this article in Hakai about their preening habits when they return from foraging flights. Seriously. It’s pretty cool.

Reading: “Summerwater,” by Sarah Moss, thanks to this smart review by Dwight Garner in The Times.

Listening: Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “Miracles,” with Ty Segall.

Finally, if you’re way out on the edge of the Internet, thin pickings to screen, you’re thinking of re-upping “The Wire” or watching “Succession” again, do yourself a favor. Don’t. Hop into the wayback machine instead, and read this 2005 Burkhard Bilger article in The New Yorker, “The Egg Men: How breakfast gets served at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas.” It’s a whole world he documents, an amazing thing. See you on Sunday.