Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

March 18, 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. Eric Kim brought us a new recipe for milk bread (above) this week, along with a powerful argument for making it. The process, he wrote, "invites me to shut off my brain, to stop tinkering. I've found that when I make time for this bread, with its two rises, each an hour or more, I'm also making time to take a bath, time to read a book, time to pour myself a glass of wine (usually all three). It feels as if I'm lengthening the day beyond its 24 hours."

That sounds ideal for a weekend. (That it will also make it possible for me to make my family the ham and mayonnaise sandwiches that Eric's mom made for him as a child is a bonus. Later there will be grilled cheese, French toast, and croutons for salad.)

But milk bread is not all I'll make. Melissa Clark has a new recipe herself, for cauliflower shawarma with spicy tahini, and I'd really like that as well, with warm pita bread and five-minute hummus on the side, along with Yotam Ottolenghi's deconstructed baba ghanouj, diced tomatoes, red onion, cucumbers and a big bowl of pomegranate seeds. And maybe some Persian jeweled rice? Big feast.

This could be a great weekend for lamb shanks braised with fresh herbs, and maybe for Nashville-style hot fried chicken as well. (Hot chicken on slices of Eric's milk bread? Yes, please.) Or maybe you're celebrating St. Joseph's Day on Saturday? Make pasta with sardines, bread crumbs and capers for that.

Regardless, it'd be fun to make a large stack of Bobby Flay's double-chocolate pancakes for brunch on Sunday, if only to watch the eyes of the children go large. (For the adults, cornmeal waffles with smoked salmon.)

And for dinner that night, to round out the weekend: maybe Sunday sauce with ziti. Or three-cup vegetables. Or this excellent tofu and herb salad with sesame.

There are many thousands more recipes to cook in the next few days awaiting you on New York Times Cooking. (We post additional inspiration on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.) I am sorry to be so blunt, but you need a subscription to access them. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. If you haven't yet done so, would you please consider subscribing today? Thanks!

We will be standing by in the wings should anything go wrong in your kitchen or in our code. Just send us a letter — cookingcare@nytimes.com — and someone will get back to you. (You can also write to me, if you'd like to say hello: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it's nothing to do with sea salt or persimmons, but Devon O'Neil, in Outside magazine, has a riveting and scary look at an avalanche death in Colorado that took place at an advanced-safety class at an avalanche school. As the popularity of safety schools booms, the article asks, who's responsible for making sure the students come home?

Danny Chau, in The New Yorker, explored the joy of cooking "blasphemous" fusion food. That's worth a read and deep consideration.

I'm late to it, but here's a poem from Rebecca Hazelton in the Virginia Quarterly Review, "The Husband as Tilda Swinton in Most Anything."

Housekeeping: In a previous email, I said my colleague Dan Barry was a child of Nassau County. He's actually a child of Suffolk, from the hamlet of Deer Park, in Babylon.

Finally, Miranda Lambert has a new single in advance of her new album, "Palomina," due in April. It's "Strange." Play that nice and loud, and I'll see you on Sunday.