Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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Romulo Yanes for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Vivian Lui.

Friday, May 7, 2021

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. It’s Mother’s Day weekend, and, if you’re not quite ready yet to take up a big table in the back of the Cheesecake Factory for cinnamon-swirl pancakes and a glass of Champagne, you might consider hooking up the maternal figure in your life with something special and homemade this year, her second Mother’s Day spent under pandemic rules.

Maybe blueberry muffins for a breakfast in bed? Eggs Benedict (above)? This delightful, buttery cinnamon toast? A festive lunch of fettuccine with asparagus? I know a few moms who’d be pleased with a Negroni and a very long bath.

Make that happen on Sunday for someone, even if the person you’re making it happen for is yourself. It takes real courage, to raise children. Celebrate mothers!

And cook a lot, too. I’m looking forward to putting this Mexican carne adobada on the grill on Sunday, after marinating it overnight. (You could if you like use the marinade on pork instead, and serve the cooked meat with pineapple salsa.) Though I could be persuaded to bail on that plan and make Taiwanese popcorn chicken with fried basil or baked cod with crunchy miso-butter bread crumbs instead.

In the oven for after: a one-bowl carrot cake with a tangy cream-cheese topping, slightly toasted like a Basque cheesecake. (Or perhaps this carrot loaf cake with lemon glaze?) Morning glory muffins for breakfast? If I can find some rhubarb, I’d like to bake Edna Lewis’s rhubarb pie for whenever I want to eat it, which is right now.

Go take a look at New York Times Cooking and see what else you may get up to in the kitchen this weekend. It does require a subscription, yes, but we think a subscription is of value for tens of thousands of recipes, along with many tools and features that’ll help you use them, and a passionate and growing community of subscribers with whom you can share notes and ingredient substitutions and recipe hacks. Subscriptions 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. (You can bring ire or gratitude to me directly: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it’s a long ferry ride from edible nasturtiums and this excellent coffee cake, but along with Billie Eilish’s new song, I think you should check out “Vincenzo” on Netflix, about a Korean-born Italian lawyer and mafia consigliere.

Here’s Adam Leith Gollner in The New Yorker, on the concept of “minerality” in wine, and how it took off. “Language is a tool that allows us to interrogate wines,” one plant biologist and wine writer told him. “The journey from the perception to the word is fraught, but I like the word ‘minerality,’ because I know what it is when I taste it.”

The invaluable Longreads turned me onto this piece of true crime by Tobias Buck in New Zealand’s “North & South.”

Finally, here’s a poem from Louise Glück: “Second Wind,” in The Threepenny Review. Enjoy that and I’ll see you on Sunday.