Go for the gold: Food That’s Worth Waiting For

October 18, 2021

Mark Weinberg for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

Food That's Worth Waiting For

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. I made a quesadilla the other day: ham and Swiss cheese with some mango salsa I had in the fridge, with sour cream and Jamaican hot sauce. I took my time making it, too, cooking the tortillas slowly in butter so they crisped and pillowed, flipping them back and forth a few times before I fished the package out of the pan to rest for a moment, then cut it in eighths. My wife grew impatient and asked: "What is that, a slow-food quesadilla?"

Maybe? (Give it a try yourself.) I like the process of cooking as much as I do the culture of serving food and the joy of consuming it. I like watching flavors develop as the colors and textures of ingredients change, the way butter goes brown and nutty, how cheese melts, how fat renders. I like how that takes time.

You could make these garlicky chicken thighs with scallion and lime (above) in a little more than 30 minutes. But I can stretch the endeavor to nearly an hour and often do, cooking the chicken carefully to create burnished, golden-brown skin, then lingering with the garlic for longer than the recipe calls for, so it softens and softens, and imparts its scent into the sauce.

Not that you always want to operate on a slow bell, of course. You don't want to lollygag when you're making an omelet, or this amazing dish we call shrimp in purgatory. You don't want to overcook anything. But do take the time, always, to observe what's happening in your pans or pots, on your stovetop or in your oven, cooking by feel and sound and scent. It's my argument that you'll have a better time in the kitchen and put better food on the table as well.

Recipes to experiment with, then, in this vein: a vegetable paella with chorizo; Swedish cardamom buns; fish larb; and taktouka with burrata, a Moroccan cooked salad of bell peppers in a spiced tomato sauce, here with a cheesy topping. Also: tinga de pollo, pan-roasted pork chops with apple fritters, and caramelized-scallion noodles.

There are many thousands more recipes to spark your imagination on New York Times Cooking. You do need a subscription in order to access them, it's true, and to use the tools and features on our site and apps. But we think that's good value in both directions. Subscriptions allow our work to continue. So please consider, if you haven't already, subscribing today.

And of course we'll be at your six, in case anything goes awry while you're cooking or using the site and apps. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (You can also write to me, though I can't respond to everyone: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I do read every letter sent.)

Now, it's precious little to do with tempering chocolate or cutting parsnips into dice, but James Dolan on "My Father, the Hitman," in D Magazine? Oh, boy. You'll want to read that.

Holy smokes, you can paint your KitchenAid mixer if you don't like the Empire Red hue that you registered for before your wedding? Here's how to do it. (And here's the awesome color Gentleman's Gray, from Benjamin Moore.)

You going to see the Calida Rawles exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in New York? You can get a decent sense of the show from the gallery's website. And Enuma Okoro wrote about the artist for The Times last month.

Finally, some newish music to play us off, which I learned about in the essential At Home and Away newsletter by Melissa Kirsch: Bedouine, "It Wasn't Me." Enjoy that, and I'll be back on Wednesday.

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