Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

October 1, 2021

Kelly Marshall for The New York Times

What to Cook This Weekend

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. There was a honking wind on the eastern end of Long Island, more north than west, and whitecaps were rushing into the Montauk inlet: rough fishing if you wanted to go, and many didn't. There've been precious few bass around and no false albacore to speak of. I watched the water for a while — the birds punching into the wind, the guides in their trucks deciding whether to pull the pin and cancel, or to get in the boat and try — then went to eat pancakes.

And just like that, an outside day became an inside one, a day for cooking. It's a sort of gift, when that happens: time when you didn't think you'd have it, and the chance to experiment. When it lines up with a weekend, so much the better.

If you'd like to join me, give Vallery Lomas's new recipe for dirty rice a try, not as a side dish, but as a one-pot meal rich with chicken livers, beef and pork. Or make Yewande Komolafe's roasted carrots with yaji spice relish (above), which she wrote about in a new column for The Times this week.

You could make a Mississippi roast, or some butter tarts. It'd be a fine weekend to make a classic lasagna. Also, these pickle-brined fried chicken sandwiches.

I'd like to bake Brie. And pastelitos. And I'd very much like to burble up a pot of Irish stew.

And then I'd like pancakes again, this time off Tejal Rao's new recipe, which she adapted from the memory of eating besan cheela, crisp-soft chickpea-flour pancakes, with Madhur Jaffrey. "I wasn't really sure what I made," Tejal wrote in a column about cooking them for herself, "except that it was extremely delicious." That sounds like just the ticket for Sunday night.

You can find many thousands more recipes on New York Times Cooking. (It is true that you need a subscription to access them. Subscriptions allow this dance to continue. Please, if you haven't already, won't you subscribe today?) Save the recipes you like to your recipe box. Then rate the ones you make, and leave notes on any for which you've developed a hack or substituted an ingredient. You can find more general instruction, too: how to make quiche, for instance, or how to stock a modern pantry.

And please write for help, if you find yourself stuck in the kitchen or confused by the technology. We're at cookingcare@nytimes.com, and someone will get back to you, I promise. (You can also write to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it's nothing to do with creamed onions or the scent of vadouvan, but you ought to get to know the women of the Lone Star Mower Racing Association, profiled by Dina Gachman in Texas Monthly. (And speaking of Texas, maybe it's time to stream "Friday Night Lights" again, on Netflix?)

I think you'll enjoy Kendra Allen's new book of poetry, "The Collection Plate."

Holland Cotter got me excited for "Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror," a blockbuster show of the American artist's work at both the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 100 miles away. Holland says it's worth it to try to take in both, if you're able: "It's the story they tell together that's the truer one," he wrote, "the one that lets a notoriously complicated body of art look and feel as richly original as it really is."

Finally, here's a new single from Carly Pearce, "What He Didn't Do." Listen to that in the kitchen, and I will see you on Sunday.

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