Go for the gold: What to Cook This Week

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

Sunday, May 9, 2021

What to Cook This Week

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Happy Mother’s Day to all those women who’ve shouldered so much parental work during these last 14 months, and happy Mother’s Day personally to Dorie Greenspan, who brought us an incredible new recipe for gâteau Basque (above) this week. We all ought to make it today in honor of maternity, or Basque culture, or just because it’s delicious: two disks of rolled-out airy-crumbly dough with a baked-in filling of pastry cream or jam. It’s a cake that resembles a cake, Dorie writes in her column, as much as Boston cream pie resembles a pie — which is to say not at all. Eat it with your fingers for dessert tonight.

You can make the meal that precedes it Basque as well, if you like. We’ve got a fine recipe for fish with clams in salsa verde that would make most mothers proud. Florence Fabricant recommends making the dish with hake or halibut. Cod would work as nicely, as would haddock or flounder.

But you don’t have to. We have a load of recipes for a Mother’s Day dinner to peruse, or you can follow my lead and make kimbap, Korean “seaweed rice,” sturdy, nori-wrapped rolls of rice and fillings. Darun Kwak calls for fish cakes, Spam, eggs and vegetables in hers. I’ve swapped in imitation crab and Alaskan smoked salmon, myself. Kimbap is what you make of it.

So that’s Sunday. On Monday, how about trying your hand at baked rajma, Punjabi-style red beans with cream? It’s a dead-simple recipe that we’ve called “the indisputable king of bean dishes.”

For a Tuesday meal, more simplicity: three-cup chicken for the win. There are some lovely notes below the recipe, one of which recounts how some Taiwanese guests “bogarted the whole pot.” I love that verb! (Here’s the Little Feat soundtrack.)

Wednesday’s meant to be cloudy with a chance of meatballs. I like these lamb numbers from the Los Angeles chef Suzanne Goin, as well as these Italian ones from Kim Severson.

On Thursday, how about spring minestrone with kale and pasta? Or kimchi and potato hash with eggs? Or tofu and green beans with chile crisp?

And then you can spin into the weekend with a lovely lamb biryani if you have the time to pull it off, or this terrific twice-cooked pork tenderloin if you don’t.

Thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this week are waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. You need a subscription to access them all, but I’m hoping you’ll find that of value: These are good recipes we’re hawking! Subscriptions in any case support our work and allow it to continue. Please, if you haven’t already, subscribe today.

We are as always standing by to help, should something go wrong with your cooking or our technology. Just write cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise.

If you’ve got some time before brunch today, or if you find yourself idly scrolling your phone while your gâteau Basque bakes, check us out on Instagram, and on Facebook as well. On Twitter, you’ll find links to our news articles. And you should absolutely visit us on YouTube. (I’m on Twitter and Instagram myself: @samsifton.)

Now, it’s a fair distance from cheese curds and blackberries, but Parul Sehgal got me excited for Alison Bechdel’s new book. Get on that, would you?

It’s slight, but I still really liked this brief history of car keys, in the magazine published by AAA.

Would you live in an apartment in a Quonset hut? That’s happening in Detroit, according to Fast Company. (You can read more about the project here.)

Finally, music from a mom who is so much more than a mom to play us off: Kim Gordon, “Sketch Artist.” Enjoy that and I’ll be back on Monday.