Go for the gold: Get Ready for Lunar New Year

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

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

Get Ready for Lunar New Year

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Andrea Nguyen has a lovely story in The Times this week about family celebrations of Tet, the Vietnamese holiday observed on the Lunar New Year, which this year falls on Feb. 12.

“When Vietnamese people celebrate Tet,” Andrea writes, “they describe it as ‘an Tet,’ an expression that translates to ‘eating the New Year.’ ” So naturally there are recipes to accompany her words. You’re meant to relax on the holiday, so make the dishes ahead to the extent that you can: thit heo kho trung (above), southern-style pork shoulder and eggs in coconut caramel sauce; suon kho, northern-style pork ribs in caramel sauce; dua gia, pickled bean sprouts with carrots and scallions; dua hanh, pickled shallots; and keo lac vung, crunchy peanut-sesame candy.

As for eating this week, I’m thinking this new recipe for salty-sweet barbecue salmon with broccoli could be nice, as would this hearty Jamaican curry chicken and potatoes.

Would you consider creamy vegan polenta with mushrooms and kale at some point? Nutritional yeast gives it a fine umami pop. No? Try these jerk chicken meatballs with a barbecue-pineapple glaze instead.

I’m about due for a platter of pork chops in cherry pepper sauce with spaghetti on the side. I’d love to knock out some peppermint brownies. Some sour cream chicken enchiladas and fish with sizzling olive butter too.

And by the weekend, I’ll be ready to sketch out my plans for Super Bowl feasting: chicken wings and Buffalo cauliflower; enchiladas con carne; green dip and icy cut vegetables.

We have thousands and thousands more recipes waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go take a look and see what inspires you to head to the stove. Save the recipes you want to make. Rate the ones you’ve made. Leave notes on them, too, if you’ve come up with a hack or substituted an ingredient successfully and want to remember it or share your findings with your fellow subscribers.

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We will be standing by to help, in case anything goes wrong with your cooking or our technology. Just send us a message at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (If not? Write me directly: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it’s nothing to do with nutmeg or granola, but if you missed Michael Paulson’s amazing oral history of the pandemic’s effect on the Broad way smash “Moulin Rouge,” please catch up with it now. It’s super.

A lot of us think of Nathan Myhrvold as a food innovator, the puckish genius behind the science of “Modernist Cuisine.” But he’s also a superb photographer who has just released the highest resolution photographs ever taken of snowflakes, in Smithsonian Magazine. They’re beautiful.

The political reporter and ace home cook Adam Nagourney sent along this amazing clip from May 1967 he found way down a C-SPAN rabbit hole, of Gov. Ronald Reagan and Senator Robert F. Kennedy responding to student questions about the Vietnam War. Bill Bradley is one of the students!

The photographer Corky Lee died last week at 73. In The New Yorker, Hua Hsu reflected on how his work helped generations of Asian-Americans see themselves.

Finally, do lose yourself in this “Close Read” by Jason Farago, examining the collage work of the Spanish artist Juan Gris. It’s spellbinding, and you’ll learn a lot. I’ll be back on Friday.