Go for the gold: What to Cook This Week

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Sabra Krock for The New York Times

Sunday, February 7, 2021

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. My friend Gilbert was talking about baguettes the other day, about how the really good ones have this shatteringly crisp crust that can cut the roof of your mouth, and how soft and airy they are within, and how good they smell, and I was suddenly filled with longing and amazement: I haven’t had a good baguette in more than a year. I haven’t had a platter of char siu. I haven’t had a New Jersey bar pizza or a proper lobster roll or a fried grouper sandwich or a slab of hot foie gras.

I’ve cooked more than I ever have and eaten fantastically well. I’ve made new recipes, hacked recipes, come up with no-recipe recipes. (Last night: coins of hot Italian sausage crisped in brown butter with artichoke hearts, then deglazed with a splash of chicken stock, tossed with cavatelli and showered with Parmesan. If you try that, brown the sausages whole before you coin them. It gives the slices structure.) I’m not living in hardship. I’ve got work. But it’s strange what I miss, what I’m looking forward to, when all this is over. How about you? Tell me about it. I’m at foodeditor@nytimes.com.

Here’s what to cook tonight, if you’re not making my pasta or setting yourself up for the Super Bowl with a platter of game-day nachos (above), or crisp chicken schnitzel with a lemony herb salad. Read the notes below the recipe. They’re invaluable.

On Monday, get out of your breakfast rut with one of these super-fast breakfast ideas, have a leftover schnitzel sandwich at lunch, and give these vegetarian Swedish meatballs a try for dinner.

For Tuesday, I’m thinking sloppy Joes. Or picadillo. Something with ground beef, anyway. (Buy the 80-20 mix, please. It’s more delicious.)

Wednesday night could be good for pasta with walnuts and olives, earthy and warm, maybe with feta and some extra lemon juice for brightness.

Taco Thursday? I like these fish tacos, myself. They’re bonkers good.

And then on Friday, you could make this slow-cooker chicken with 20 cloves of garlic. Or this roast pork with milk. Or this seared tofu with mixed grains.

Thousands and thousands more recipes to make this week are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go see what you find. You can save the recipes you want to make. (You can do that even if the recipe doesn’t come from The Times. Here’s how.) You can rate the ones you’ve cooked. And you can leave notes on the recipes, too, if you’ve developed a hack or discovered an ingredient substitution you want to remember or tell your fellow subscribers about.

I think we’ve talked about that? About how you need to be a subscriber to enjoy all the benefits of NYT Cooking? Subscriptions support all that we’re doing here and allow that work to continue. If you haven’t already, I hope that you will consider subscribing to NYT Cooking today. Thank you.

We in the meantime will be standing by to offer assistance, should something go wrong in your cooking or with our site and apps. Reach out to us: cookingcare@nytimes.com. And someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with salmon or chokecherries, but I think you should read Imani Perry’s first installment of The Times’s “Black History, Continued” project, about the weight our culture puts on Black heroes, and how their stories obscure how change actually comes to America.

Here’s a song you’ll put on repeat: “Me & Magdalena,” performed by the Monkees (really!) and written by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie.

See what you think of David Duchovny on failure, in The Atlantic.

Finally, to end where we started, let’s have a visit with Mahmoud M’seddi, one of Paris’s best bakers of baguettes. It would be nice to go to there. I’ll be back on Monday.