Go for the gold: What to Cook Right Now

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Julia Gartland for The New York Times (Photography and Styling)

Monday, June 7, 2021

What to Cook Right Now

Sam Sifton

Good morning. It’s funny, what professional food people get up to, cooking at home. I love the celery toasts the chef and writer Gabrielle Hamilton adds to her snack trays, and the tinned fish that leads our restaurant critic, Pete Wells, to declare himself “at least 35 percent sardine.” And I’m a big fan of the potato chip omelet (above) that the chef Ferran Adrià makes for his family, a quicker take on a Spanish tortilla that you can make with supplies picked up at the corner store.

Try that tonight! It’s easy and fast and then you’ll have time to set yourself up for dirty horchatas in the morning. (Or at least some cold-brew coffee.)

This week I want to make Millie Peartree’s take on a classic macaroni salad. Pile some of that into a deli container and take it to a park bench for lunch? That’s living. Flourishing, even! (Millie has a fine potato salad with sweet relish, as well. I’d like that with some hot dogs grilled crisp over an open fire.)

I’d also like to try my hand at Naz Deravian’s mahi ba somagh, a Persian recipe for roasted fish sprinkled with sumac and drizzled with orange and lime juice, and at her dami-yeh gojeh nokhod farangi, tomato-egg rice.

Not to mention: Sarah DiGregorio’s smoky white bean and beef sloppy joes, just terrific on potato rolls, and a lot lighter than the classic belly bombs; these no-bake chocolate mousse bars; a beer-can chicken and this easy rhubarb trifle. I want to cook a lot of things.

You do, too, I hope. There are thousands more recipes to choose from waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Go take a look and see what jumps out at you, what you find. You can save the recipes you want to make. And rate the ones you’ve made. You can also leave notes on them if you discover something about a recipe you want to remember or share with your fellow subscribers.

Yes, subscribers. I’ve mentioned this before, I think. By subscribing, you support the work of the dozens of people who work to make the site and apps possible. You allow that work to continue. I hope if you haven’t already, that you will subscribe to New York Times Cooking today.

And of course you can reach out to us directly if something goes sideways along the way, either with your cooking or our technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (I’m at foodeditor@nytimes.com if you’d like to send a dart or deliver a flower. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it’s a long day’s drive from a discussion of sous vide cooking or the validity of ramps, but I loved “Len Bias, a Bouquet of Flowers and Ms. Brooks,” a golden shovel poem from Michael Collier in The Times, built on a borrowed line in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Last Quatrain of a Ballad for Emmett Till.”

(Want to watch 15 minutes of Len Bias highlights, from his days playing for the University of Maryland? I did.)

This is terrific: Pamela Petro in Guernica, on becoming a kitchen archivist.

Finally, some music to play us off, embedded in a fine article by The Times’s Joshua Barone: J.S. Bach’s six cello suites, reinterpreted for violin by Johnny Gandelsman. I’ll return on Wednesday.