Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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

Friday, May 21, 2021

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Gabrielle Hamilton took a close look at the economics of restaurant brunch this week in The Times, reflecting on the two decades she spent working the shift at Prune, her jewel box of a dining room in the East Village, before putting the place to sleep at the start of the pandemic. It’s a delicious read as it always is when Gabrielle takes to the keyboard — “that 10-burner egg station during a rocking, relentless, 230-covers brunch, holy smokes!” — and reflective, too. If she ever brings her business back, she writes, it won’t be to serve brunch, not in a city where the word has become a verb and the waiters make four times what those cooking the eggs do. She’s already thrown out the pans.

But Gabrielle misses the big batches of ranchero sauce (above) that she made every Friday in advance of the weekend rush. “More than shaved truffle,” she writes, “more than freshly peeled oranges or chocolate-cake baking, simmering ranchero sauce is the scent that I still miss and crave.”

You can use the stuff for huevos rancheros, obviously: simmering sauce in a pan and cracking a couple of eggs into it until their whites have just set, then scattering shredded Chihuahua cheese over the top and broiling it, to serve with tortilla chips, avocado, cilantro leaves and hot sauce. That’d be an excellent thing to do this weekend. But Gabrielle has other uses for the sauce, too: “Poach shrimp in it, or cubed swordfish,” she writes. “Use it as a sauce under batter-fried fish with quick-pickled red onion; reheat shredded roasted chicken or pork in it for a loaded nachos lunch for your kiddos, add it to Cheddar-scrambled eggs and roll it up in a flour tortilla.”

And you’ll have a lot of it. The recipe’s for three quarts. Gabrielle wrote it that way in the hope that you might share ranchero sauce around your community of friends now that we’re starting to see one another again. It’s an excellent host gift that pays dividends at the table, at brunch or dinner.

Maybe you’ll get to grill this weekend, in a park or campsite if not on a deck or in the backyard. I like these grilled chicken skewers with tarragon and yogurt. Also this grilled eggplant salad. And this coffee-rubbed grilled fish. But I could also see my way to a simple hot-dog party, with toppings and condiments galore.

These are good days, as well, to make a simple strawberry tart, to make the blueberry cobbler from Chez Panisse, to make apricot bread pudding.

Or are you in the Pacific Northwest and seeing morels everywhere? Make this shockingly good pan-roasted chicken in cream sauce I learned to make at the elbow of the chef Angie Mar. Maybe make it this weekend even if you can’t find morels in the forest, but only at the store.

Thousands and thousands more ideas are waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Go search among them and see what inspires. Then save the recipes you want to cook. (Which, by the way, you can do even if the recipe you want to save doesn’t come from our site. Here’s how to do that.) Rate the recipes you’ve cooked. And leave notes on them, as well, if you’d like to remind yourself of something you’ve improved or substituted, or want to tell the world of your fellow subscribers about it.

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In turn, we will be standing by to help, should you find yourself jammed up in the kitchen or by our technology. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with mimosas and eggs Benedict, but check out these paintings by Heather Sundquist Hall in the Bitter Southerner, with an accompanying interview by Laura Relyea.

Do read Sandra E. Garcia in T magazine, on “The Joy of Black Hair.”

I’d missed Dwight Garner on Ann McCutchan’s new biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, in The Times. I’m glad I found it. (Here’s a recipe for the crab Newburg the author of “The Yearling” served at her Cross Creek homestead in Florida.)

Finally, I’ve got some music out of Mali for you to listen to while you cook: Afel Bocoum, “Penda Djiga.” Listen to that and I’ll see you on Sunday.