Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

December 3, 2021

Anna Williams for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Susan Spungen. Prop Stylist: Sarah Smart.

What to Cook This Weekend

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. It's cookie season, our Genevieve Ko reports, and her team has assembled an incredible calendar of holiday recipes (above) to enjoy this weekend and for the rest of the month, either for yourself or for gift packages to distribute to family and friends.

Behold the array! We've got gingerbread biscotti and iced oatmeal cookies from Jerrelle Guy, and no-bake chocolate clusters from Dorie Greenspan. Genevieve contributed recipes for guava and cream cheese twists and peanut butter cookies.

Yewande Komolafe brought us hibiscus-spiraled ginger cookies and spiced orange crumble cookies. In keeping with his exploration of commodity deliciousness, Eric Kim delivered a fine recipe for M&M cookies.

Here's Vaughn Vreeland's recipe for peppermint brownie cookies, and Melissa Clark's for almond spritz cookies and chocolate babka rugelach. Samantha Seneviratne came through with fig and cherry cookie pies, and New York Times reader Naomi Donabedian offered her stunner for the Finnish cookie known as piparkaut.

Claire Saffitz's minty lime bars are in the mix as well, along with Alexa Weibel's raspberry slices and, for the savory-cookie crowd, there are Kay Chun's Cheddar cheese coins and Ali Slagle's mixed-nut shortbread.

Try Margaux Laskey's Italian rainbow cookies adapted from Mary Carpino and Krysten Chambrot's torticas de Morón, a Cuban favorite. Also, Yossy Arefi is here with recipes for tahini thumbprints with dulce de leche and chocolate-cherry ginger cookies, and Sohla El-Waylly with brown-butter toffee sandwich cookies, chewy gingerbread cookies and fruity meltaways.

That's a lot of cookies! I hope some of you make them all this month. (For help in that pursuit, make sure to sign up for our December newsletter, "Your Daily Cookie." We'll send you a cookie recipe every day until Christmas.)

For sustenance as you bake, please consider our recipe for the chef Thomas Keller's butternut squash soup with brown butter. Or for kimbap. Or for this remarkable dish of pan-roasted chicken in cream sauce, which the chef Angie Mar taught me to make in her tiny kitchen at the Beatrice Inn in Manhattan, before she decamped for a more commodious and luxe space next door at Les Trois Chevaux.

Maybe you'd prefer garlicky beef tenderloin with orange horseradish sauce? Or tofu makhani?

There are many thousands more recipes to consider making this weekend waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. (As we've discussed a few times, I believe, you need a subscription to access them. Subscriptions are what allow us to continue to do this work that we love. If you haven't gotten one already, I hope you will subscribe today. You can also buy gift subscriptions.) Further inspiration is on our Instagram page and our YouTube channel, where some of our cookies contributors will be showing off their recipes over these next few days.

And do reach out if you find yourself flummoxed in the kitchen or by our technology. Just write cookingcare@nytimes.com and someone will get back to you.

Now, it's nothing to do with ranch dressing or chicory, but you should read Ian Urbina's harrowing story, in The New Yorker, about the brutal system of migrant jails in Libya and the complicity of the European Union in what the United Nations recently formally labeled state-directed crimes against humanity. Urbina and his team paid a heavy price for their reporting, as you'll see.

Here's a lovely fish story in Experience, by Matt Crossman, on a legendary strain of California trout that's found in Crane Creek in Missouri and how it might have gotten there. (A tip of the hat to the essential Longreads for highlighting it.)

Are you following us on TikTok yet? Y'oughta.

Finally, as we continue to reflect on the life and legacy of Stephen Sondheim, who died last week at 91, here's Sarah Vaughan with his "Send in the Clowns." Haunting. I'll see you on Sunday.

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