Go for the gold: What to Cook This Week

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David Malosh for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas.

Sunday, May 30, 2021

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. There’s a lovely special section in the print edition of The Times today devoted to the joys of summer eating, and to the recipes the staffs of the Food desk and New York Times Cooking are looking forward to preparing in the coming weeks and months. Naturally it appears on our website as well, but see if you can’t track down the analog version at a newsstand or library. It’s a wonderful thing to see in print. And then cook from it!

Also in The Times this weekend, Tejal Rao has a great column about the chef Romy Gill, author of “Zaika: Vegan Recipes from India.” In it, she writes about Gill’s love of canned jackfruit, which she uses to make a sabzi (above) with a gravy of tomatoes and spices, caramelized onions and oil-popped mustard seeds. A sprinkling of amchur — unripe-mango powder — adds what Tejal characterizes as depth and tang.

I think you could get on that today, even if you have to add a trip to the market for a few ingredients. Maybe serve some toor dal on the side. Or a few roti? That’d be a very nice meal.

Monday is Memorial Day. If you can knock out the marinade today, jerk chicken could be on the menu tomorrow, with mango slaw. (Or you can try this other jerk chicken, with pickled bananas.) If not — I’ve already asked you to make sabzi, you’re just going to make burgers and pico de gallo-covered hot dogs and brats for the holiday — that’s just fine. But do yourself a favor and par-cook the brats in beer, with a lot of sliced onions, before grilling. They’ll crisp up but stay plump and delicious that way, and you’ll love them even more than usual.

Tuesday, I’m thinking, might be good for baked orzo with artichokes and peas. Or a one-pan roasted fish with cherry tomatoes.

On Wednesday, take a break. Order a plain pizza from wherever you order pizza, and an order of chicken tikka masala from wherever you order Indian food. Top the pizza with the chicken and sauce, and consume with a knife and fork. Seriously. You’re welcome.

For Thursday’s dinner, how about an herb-flecked polenta with corn, eggs and feta?

And then on Friday, you can head into the weekend with pork chops in lemon-caper sauce, one of my favorite recipes of the last few years, which Toni Tipton-Martin developed for her indispensable 2019 cookbook, “Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking.”

Thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this week await you on New York Times Cooking. You do, of course, need a subscription to access all of them. If you don’t have one yet, I hope you will think about subscribing today. Your subscription is important. It allows our work to continue.

We are standing by to help if anything goes awry while you’re cooking or using our technology. Just write us: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (You can reach me at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it’s nothing to do with the price of saffron or the relative saltiness of kosher salts, but I think you’re going to see “The Other Black Girl,” by Zakiya Dalila Harris, on a lot of beaches this summer. You may want to get started on that.

A fascinating article that Longreads alerted me to: Vijai Maheshwari on “My Bizarre Reign as New York’s King of ‘Virgin Russian Hair,’” in Narratively.

Here’s Jill Eisenstadt on “The Bennington Girl,” in Guernica, and like everything she writes, it’s just great: memoir and cultural criticism made one.

Finally, here’s Jesse Royal featuring Vybz Kartel, “Rich Forever.” Music to cook to. Play loud and I’ll be back on Monday.