Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

February 25, 2022

Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas.

What to Cook This Weekend

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. The novelist Bryan Washington has joined our team of Eat columnists for The New York Times Magazine, and he commenced his work this week with a paean to the Jamaican beef patty, "an island's history in the palm of your hand." It's a lovely essay accompanied by a fantastic recipe for patties (above) that would make a fine lunch, snack or even addition to a weekend meal of brown stew chicken with rice and peas.

(Back in 1995, my colleague Michael Cooper looked at how Jamaican beef patties made their way onto the menus of New York pizzerias, sliced open and baked with mozzarella and coins of pepperoni. That was the custom at my neighborhood slice shop when I was growing up and, if you have leftover patties, it's worth trying at home.)

What else to cook this weekend? We've got loads of new recipes. You might try Eric Kim's bacon and onion pasta, in a delicious sauce of sweet vermouth and bacon fat that Eric swears is the perfect foil for angel hair. Go to!

Ali Slagle, meanwhile, has a pretty cool recipe for spiced and buttered pork chops under a sprinkle of sugar and salt. You cook them covered in a skillet, low and slow, and baste them with butter. That could not turn out badly if you tried. She also delivers this vegan red cabbage ragù that's warming and deeply flavorful. Will you shower yours with nutritional yeast? I might.

Zainab Shah has a recipe for kharra masala fish that could be your new favorite, with a sweet and sour tomato-and-onion sauce that comes together in under 30 minutes. Kasia Pilat brings us an incredible Polish soup, ogórkowa zupa, hearty with root vegetables, that carries a delicious tang from the addition of grated pickles.

Other recipes to cook this weekend include this caramelized banana pudding and this creamy Swiss chard pasta with leeks, tarragon and lemon zest. I'd like to fit in some cod cakes as well, and some bricklayer-style nachos on Sunday night, to accompany the Mavericks-Warriors game.

There are many more recipes to make this weekend awaiting you on New York Times Cooking, and even more inspiration on our social media channels: TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. It is a fact that you need a subscription to access them and to use our tools and features. It is also a fact that subscriptions allow us to continue to do this work that we love. So I give thanks to you for yours. And if you haven't yet, I hope you will subscribe today. Thanks for that as well.

We'll be standing by to render assistance should anything go wrong along the way. Just write us: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (You can write to me directly, if you'd like to send a dart or an apple: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it's nothing to do with grapefruit or venison backstraps, but I loved Elizabeth A. Harris and Thomas Prior's "How a Book is Made" in The Times, about how vats of ink and rolls of paper were used to print Marlon James's new novel, "Moon Witch, Spider King."

On fancy women in trouble: "What Danielle Miller learned at Horace Mann and Rikers," by Gabrielle Bluestone in New York Magazine.

These are some pretty cool plates, from the Plated Project in Mumbai.

Finally, here's a new poem from Frederick Seidel, a wistful memory: "Whitney Ellsworth," in The New York Review of Books. Enjoy that, and I will see you on Sunday.