Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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Christopher Simpson for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

Friday, February 12, 2021

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Valentine’s Day is Sunday, and if it was one of the worst eating nights of the year in the Before Times, right up there with New Year’s Eve for amateur-hour restaurant awkwardness and forced-march cheer, maybe we can make the best of it this year at home. Even if you’ve been feeding your Valentines three meals a day for the past 11 months, the holiday is a chance to hit pause, to reflect, to make a meal of deep intention — something to remember fondly after we return to the world.

What that means in practice: This might be a chance to set the table, if not fancily, then not as you generally do. Deploy a tablecloth, maybe, or those napkins you don’t usually use. (Iron them if they’re cloth? Sure!) Set out some low candles. Maybe see if you can fish up some flowers. (Not roses, please. That’s too on the nose.) Buy a better bottle of wine than you might usually, or the fancy seltzer. Serve cucumber and tonics before dinner? Yes, please.

And to eat? Oysters on the half shell, tournedos Rossini, a watercress salad, caramel pots de crème? Maybe. Try to read the room and make sure, really sure, that you’re cooking for your sweethearts and not for yourself. Cumin-roasted salmon with cilantro sauce may be more appropriate, with steamed rice and this insanely beautiful no-bake mango lime cheesecake (above) for dessert. So may Baltimore crab cakes, followed by a salted maple pie.

Or, if your Valentines happen to be children? Can’t go wrong with chicken tenders, with fish and chips, with ham and cheese pasta and a handful of peas. Make ice cream for dessert!

Meantime, the Lunar New Year is today. I hope if you’re celebrating that you get some longevity noodles into you, some chile crisp dumplings, some fish. Maybe you can try Andrea Nguyen’s recipe for thit heo kho trung, Vietnamese braised pork and eggs in caramel sauce. (You can cook it in a pressure cooker, if you like.) Tteokguk, the Korean rice cake soup, will be on the menu for some. For others, it’ll be momos for all.

Other things to cook this weekend: goulash; Cheddar beer bread rolls; savory oatmeal with greens and yogurt. Or just go to NYT Cooking and see what you find. Save the recipes you’re thinking of making and rate the ones you’ve cooked. You can leave notes on them, too, if you’ve discovered an ingredient substitution or recipe hack.

You can if you’re a subscriber, anyway. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. I hope you will subscribe to NYT Cooking today, if you haven’t already. Thanks.

We will of course stand watch from our lifeguard chairs, in case anything goes awry while you’re cooking or using our technology. Just drop us a line: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. We’ll try to get you sorted.

Now, it’s a mighty long trip from bratwurst and mustard, but you should spend some time with my colleague C.J. Chivers’s riveting reporting on Customs and Border Protection attempts to interdict human smuggling on the ocean off Southern California, with haunting photographs by Tyler Hicks. It’s like reading a postmodern version of “The Odyssey.”

Please meet the burrowing owls of Marco Island, off the Southwest coast of Florida.

Here’s Erin Tierney in Outside, on the helicopter crash that derailed her life as a backcountry heli-ski guide and her long, difficult road back to the mountains.

And, finally, in case you missed it, you’ll want to take a look at “Framing Britney Spears” on Hulu, part of our documentary series “The New York Times Presents.” I’ll see you on Sunday.