Go for the gold: What to Cook Right Now

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Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero.

Monday, July 19, 2021

What to Cook Right Now

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Mariana Velásquez has a smart new cookbook out, “Colombiana: A Rediscovery of Recipes and Rituals from the Soul of Colombia.” Melissa Clark has been cooking from it recently, and brought us an adaptation of Velásquez’s brilliant recipe for arepas de choclo (above), griddled sweet corn cakes. The patties fry into rich, moist, golden disks that are a perfect match for a lemony tomato and avocado salad, and I think that ought to be dinner this evening for as many of us as can manage the task.

(Could you also fold some soft fresh queso blanco into the arepa dough, as Maricel Presilla taught Julia Moskin to do a few years back? I think you could try. Report back if you do!)

So that’s an idea. (Or two.) Here’s another: the spicy Sichuan noodles with pork that Florence Fabricant learned from the chef and cookbook author Ken Hom. If you’re not eating meat, you could try these chile-oil noodles with cilantro instead.

Alternatively, you could make dinner at lunchtime and allow it to chill in the refrigerator until evening: this marvelous cold tomato-cilantro soup, an excellent partner to a grilled cheese sandwich.

At some point this week I’d like to make pork ribs adobo, soy-steamed fish and a big salad with grains. I’d like to make vegan banana ice cream, too, and not because it’s vegan, precisely, but because it’s so incredibly easy to put together, and tastes so great. (Frozen banana chunks. Blend until creamy. Done!)

Go browse around New York Times Cooking and see what strikes your fancy. There are many thousands of recipes there to make your time at the stove enjoyable and your time at the dinner table a joy. It’s true that you need a subscription in order to access them. Subscriptions are what make this whole opera possible. So if you haven’t yet signed up, I hope you will do so today.

You can visit us on YouTube, and on Instagram and Twitter. You can sign up for my colleague Emily Weinstein’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter here. (Speaking of Times newsletters, have you checked out Melissa Kirsch’s At Home and Away?)

And you can reach out for help if anything gets squirrelly with your cooking or our technology. Just send us a note: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with Alaskan king crab or Jersey tomatoes, but the American singer-songwriter Faye Webster has been talking up the Japanese singer-songwriter Mei Ehara in interviews for her new record, “I Know I’m Funny Haha.” And thanks for that! It took only a few clicks to discover that Ehara’s 2017 album, “Sway,” is just great.

I bet you didn’t know that Tim Marchman, the features editor at Motherboard, has a Substack newsletter devoted to canned fish. It’s called Popping Tins.

Jason Sudeikis is on the cover of the August GQ, and the profile inside is by Zach Baron. Read that.

Finally, more music to cook with this week: “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” by Caroline Polachek. Play loud and I’ll be back on Wednesday.