Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

October 8, 2021

Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas.

What to Cook This Weekend

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. Dorie Greenspan has a lovely essay in The New York Times Magazine this week about the notebooks she's kept over the decades — ideas for recipes that are sometimes just a word or a name or a flavor waiting to be acted upon in the kitchen — and it's exciting for the rest of us to read because it's also about how those notes turn into recipes. It's about how an artist works.

Dorie has dinner, for instance: salmon coated in a glaze of miso and maple syrup. Now, say I'm served that same dinner? I might think, reflecting on its deliciousness: I could make that salmon a recipe. I could figure that out. Dorie, though? She thinks: I could make that a cake. And so she has this week, with a new recipe for maple-and-miso loaf cake (above) that would be fantastic for all of us to make this weekend. It's a meditation on the space between sweet and savory that, in Dorie's words, is "sweet enough to be called cake but savory enough to be as good with a slice of Cheddar as it is with the gloss of warm jam that I spread over its top."

I'm in! I hope you are, too. I think I'll serve mine for dessert on Saturday, after a meal of shrimp Creole or red-cooked beef short ribs, maybe after sesame-crusted fish with butter and ginger sauce. (All good with rice.)

Then, for Sunday night: braised pork all'arrabbiata, with plain pasta dressed in olive oil and this awesome salad I learned to make in the basement kitchen of Lucali in Brooklyn.

Heavy eating! If that's not to your tastes just now, you could still make Dorie's cake and have it after spicy tomato coconut bisque with shrimp and mushrooms, or cauliflower adobo. Then, on Sunday, maybe sheet-pan pierogies with brussels sprouts and kimchi? Or these honey and soy-glazed chicken thighs?

Whichever recipes you choose for your dinners, I'd like to suggest a hot-dog party for lunch tomorrow or Sunday, off Naz Deravian's new recipe for sosis bandari, a riff on a street-food dish from southern Iran, where these sausage potato sandwiches originated: beef franks cooked with potatoes in a spicy tomato sauce then stuffed into hero rolls with pickles, tomatoes and lettuce. That and some football — Rutgers against Michigan State on Saturday, maybe, or Patriots-Texans on Sunday? Fall weekends can be great.

And there are thousands and thousands more recipes to make this weekend waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. (Yes, it's true: You need a subscription to access them, same as you do to watch "Ted Lasso." Worth it!) And you can find even more inspiration on our Instagram page and on our YouTube channel, where you can watch Eric Kim explore the many faces of bulgogi.

If you run into trouble along the way, either with your cooking or our technology, please reach out for assistance. We're at cookingcare@nytimes.com, and someone will get back to you. (If that doesn't happen, or if you just have something to say — pro or con, pleasant or unpleasant — you can always write to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it's absolutely nothing to do with goat cheese or aquafaba, but Lance and April Ledbetter, of the terrific Dust-to-Digital project, are the latest guest editors of the Bitter Southerner. Here's what they've gotten up to with that.

I'm late to it, but if you're wondering: "Squid Game" on Netflix is worth your time. Our Christina Morales wrote about how the drama has driven up interest in dalgona candy, and Genevieve Ko put together a quick primer for how to make it.

Fat Bear Week in Alaska came to its conclusion on Oct. 5, but I liked this Kylie Mohr piece for High Country News and The Atlantic about how difficult it is, actually, to weigh a fat bear.

Finally, in the wake of my colleague's Pete Wells's delicious examination of the new menu at Eleven Madison Park, which I mentioned in this space a few days ago, Adam Platt at New York has taken a look at the state of the old-school fine-dining ecosystem in New York. Both are worth reading, if you missed Pete the first time around. Have a great weekend. I'll see you on Sunday.

Continue reading the main story