Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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Heami Lee for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Amy Wilson.

Friday, April 23, 2021

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Alexa Weibel brought us a terrific recipe she adapted from the chef Tony Tan’s “Hong Kong: Food City,” for spicy won tons with chile oil. They’re Cantonese in origin, so less mouth-numbingly fiery than their Sichuan cousins, and remind me of a dish served at Chef Yu, a Cantonese restaurant in the Garment District of Manhattan that labels the dumplings, confusingly, as “Szechuan won ton with red hot pepper oil.”

At Yu, the cooks supplement the chile oil with a sauce of peanut butter thinned out with hot water, soy sauce and rice wine vinegar. This is an awesome combination, and I intend to make it happen with the spicy won tons this weekend, perhaps as an appetizer in advance of a main course of ginger-scallion chicken.

I hope you’ll join me. But if not, I’ve still got plenty to recommend. Maybe a fried fish sandwich instead? Or chicken with 40 cloves of garlic? Or this fine chopped salad with chickpeas, feta and avocado?

I think this weekend would be an outstanding one for soy-butter basted scallops with wilted greens and sesame. Also to make this lemon-raspberry danish with mascarpone. (Or a grapefruit crumb cake. Your choice!)

Most of all, I hope you’ll make Tejal Rao’s new recipe for chiles rellenos (above), which she adapted from a recipe that Andrea Serrato of Mamis Xiles in East Los Angeles gave her. Each step in the process takes time and attention, from roasting the chiles to filling them, dipping them in batter, frying them and finally simmering them in salsa. But the payoff is huge, as Tejal writes in a column that accompanies the recipe: “beautiful, puffy, vaguely chile-shaped clouds.” And maybe that could be your dinner for Sunday night.

Thousands and thousands more ideas are waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. (Here’s a fresh strawberry pie! Here’s everything you need to know about cooking rice and beans!) I hope you will consider subscribing in order to access them. Subscriptions support our work. You can visit us on Instagram as well, where the photography’s beautiful. We’re on YouTube and Twitter too. And if you run into trouble along the way, either with your cooking or our technology, please ask us for help: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with baby lettuces or white asparagus, but this is a pretty interesting story about a movement to open a national park in central Georgia, by Janisse Ray in The Bitter Southerner. “Do you love life enough to imagine this place we are trying to make real,” she writes, “to lend your imagination to its creation, to sit for a moment and think of a blackwater river running through red clay down the state of Georgia, with all its layers of trauma and all its layers of love?”

Here’s Helen Rosner in The New Yorker with an interview with the great Nigella Lawson.

My pal Sara Bonisteel put me on to “The Serpent,” a BBC crime drama that follows a 1970s serial killer along the so-called hippie trail in South and Southeast Asia.

Finally, let’s turn to the Garifuna Collective to play us off and into the weekend, with “Miami,” recorded live in 2019. I’ll see you on Sunday.