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, May 14, 2021

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. I wrote about the Texas restaurateur Jennifer Hwa Dobbertin for The Times this week, and of course there’s a recipe: the red-cooked short ribs (above) served at Best Quality Daughter, the restaurant Dobbertin runs with the chef Quealy Watson in San Antonio. It’s a really delicious feed, to eat as they do at the restaurant, with lettuce wraps and rice.

Dobbertin and Watson serve all kinds of condiments to accompany the meat: a ranch dressing with tom kha paste; a version of nam prik pao, the Thai chile jam; basil yogurt. I hacked a version of that last one that you might try yourself, should you choose to make the short ribs this weekend (and you should). It’s just yogurt, mayonnaise, lots of basil leaves, somewhat fewer cilantro leaves, garlic, lime juice and salt, whizzed in a food processor until it’s a beautiful pale green and tastes great. Do let me know how that goes: foodeditor@nytimes.com.

If large-format meat is not in your game plan, you should take a look at this fine vegetarian gumbo, built on a classic roux and centering the Creole holy trinity of celery, bell peppers and onion. Lentils add depth and protein, and an optional splash of liquid smoke at the end (please use a light hand with it!) mimics the flavor you’d get from sausage or a smoke-cured ham hock.

Either way, though, consider a hummingbird cake for dessert, a kind of supercharged banana bread, moist and perfectly spiced.

No to all three? Chicken and rice with scallion-ginger sauce would be an excellent thing to eat this weekend, as would this leek risotto with sugar snap peas and pancetta. Could you see your way to making a Dutch baby for breakfast? Or a fried eggplant sandwich for lunch? That could hold me through dinner, especially if there’s rhubarb crisp in place of dinner, with vanilla ice cream and a few more episodes of “Marcella” on Netflix.

Still more: garlic-ginger chicken breasts with cilantro and mint; midnight pasta with garlic, anchovy, capers and red-pepper flakes; crispy leftover grains with halloumi and smashed cucumbers.

There are many thousands more recipes to cook this weekend awaiting you on New York Times Cooking. Go see what you find. Save the recipes you like. Rate the ones you’ve cooked. And, please, leave a note on those you’ve hacked and improved, for your own memory or for the benefit of our wider community. (Yes, you need a subscription to do all that. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. Please consider subscribing today!)

We’ll remain standing by should anything go wrong in your kitchen or with our code. Just write cookingcare@nytimes.com and someone will get back to you. I promise.

Now, it’s a long day’s paddle from lakes of extra-virgin olive oil and mountains of flour, but you should read this excerpt from Andrew McCarthy’s new memoir, “Brat: An ’80s Story,” in Vanity Fair.

Jon Caramanica put me onto Frank Turner’s new song, “The Gathering,” just one of 11 new tracks recommended by The Times’s band of pop-music scenesters.

Read Grayson Haver Currin in Outside, on Emily Ford, the first woman to complete Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail in winter.

Finally, if you can’t go in person or don’t yet want to, do spend a little time with Gerhard Richter’s “Cage” paintings, at Gagosian in New York. You won’t get a sense of their scale unless you think about it a lot, but man are they beautiful. Enjoy them and I’ll see you on Sunday.