Go for the gold: What to Cook This Week

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Linda Xiao for The New York Times Food Stylist: Judy Kim.

Sunday, May 2, 2021

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Eric Kim has a lovely story in The Times about moving home to Atlanta to live with his mother during the pandemic, and how they cooked together and what he learned: an inheritance of kimchi and jjigaes. The lessons went both ways. When Eric’s mom tasted his sheet-pan bibimbap (above), she told him, “I’m never doing it the other way again.”

That’s reason enough to try the dish for dinner tonight, I think, though it could wait until a weeknight and you could make Jean Kim’s kimchi jjigae with ribs instead, following her lead to blanch the ribs with ginger first, and to bloom the fiery gochugaru in butter. It’s an extraordinary stew. Cook’s choice — but make one of them! This is, Eric channels Nigella Lawson to say, proper home food.

On Monday, give this salad of beets, lentils and Cheddar a try. The cheese is a surprising and delicious addition, and, if you can find pre-packed roasted beets at the market, it’s a superfast meal to boot.

Tuesday would be good, if you have the time and didn’t make ribs on Sunday, to put together this slow-cooker meal of hot honey ribs. If you don’t have time or you did make ribs (or both!), give thought to miso-glazed fish. Or risotto with sausage and parsley. Worthy meals.

How about a pasta stir-fry with five-spice mushrooms and broccolini for Wednesday’s meal? Lots and lots of possible modifications in the notes below the recipe, if you don’t have all the ingredients.

I like the idea of honey-roasted carrots with barley and spiced tahini for Thursday night, and the tahini dressing is rich enough that the dish can stand as a main course. (The recipe calls for cooking the barley in water. For an extra punch, cook it in the richest stock you have on hand.)

And then on Friday night, you can make garlic chicken with guasacaca sauce, a Venezuelan salsa of avocado, herbs and lime that’s bright and silky against the crisp chicken.

Many thousands more recipes to cook this week are on display and in the back-room coffers of New York Times Cooking. You do need a subscription to access them, yes. In return, though, we’ll give you a recipe box and the ability to save recipes to it, even recipes that don’t come from our site. We’ll let you organize them, and rate them, and leave notes on them. We’ll even teach you how to make pizza.

You can watch our videos on YouTube. You can see our best photographs — and your best photographs! — on Instagram. And you can follow our reporting on Twitter. Are you on Facebook? We are.

We will be standing by to help if you run into trouble with a recipe, or with our technology. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (You can also write to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every message sent.)

Now, it’s nothing to do with garam masala or white barbecue sauce, but if you haven’t read our Michael Kimmelman’s fascinating look at the fight over a billion-dollar parking lot in the South Street historic district in Manhattan, you really ought to. It’s about much more than a parking lot.

Closer to the kitchen, you should check out this terrific story by Ute Eberle in Hakai, about the surprising rise and resilience of fish sticks, United States patent number US2724651A.

I liked Anubha Momin’s memoir, in The Walrus, about her architect mother and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Finally, old music to play us into a new week. This is Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, “J’attendrai Swing,” from 1939. Music to cook by. I’ll be back on Monday.