Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

May 6, 2022

David Malosh for The New York Times

What to Cook This Weekend

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. Tejal Rao has an exciting piece of restaurant criticism in The Times this week, about finding great cioppino in San Francisco, a city so awash in the seafood stew that it can sometimes appear cliché.

Naturally, there's a showstopper of a recipe (above) to accompany her words, a cioppino to make the case for cioppino forevermore. And if the stars align correctly, I'm hoping thousands and thousands of you will make it for Mother's Day lunch on Sunday.

The recipe's adapted from the one at Anchor Oyster Bar in the heart of the Castro neighborhood, with a long-simmered marinara sauce thinned out with clam juice and then packed with whatever excellent seafood you can procure. (That said, Dungeness crab in the shell is mandatory, at least according to Roseann Grimm, the chef and owner of the restaurant.) I'll be honest: It's a fair amount of work. But if you put in a few hours on Saturday, mom will be thrilled on Sunday, and you'll reap the rewards for that.

Find other Mother's Day recipe ideas here and here. But you can't go wrong with a Dutch baby, or buttermilk pancakes, eggs Benedict or a quiche Lorraine. Or crispy hash browns and eggs!

Of course, some moms are probably like mine, who fiercely decried the holiday as an instrument of the flower-industrial complex. For them, cook something a little less on-the-nose than brunch. There's that cioppino, for instance! Or tajín grilled chicken, in which the spice mix of chiles and lime seasons a garlicky chipotle glaze that has a hint of sweetness. That glaze chars beautifully over boneless, skinless chicken thighs for an easy weekend win. (It would work well with grilled shrimp or tofu, too.) Make some yellow rice to go with it, and maybe a pot of no-recipe beans.

And you can always bake: a strawberry scone loaf; baked carrot cake doughnuts; a hummingbird cake.

There are thousands and thousands more recipes waiting for you on New York Times Cooking, at least if you have a subscription to our site and app. Those subscriptions are important. They allow us to keep doing this work that we love. Thank you for yours. And if you haven't already, will you consider subscribing today? Thanks!

You can write for help if you run into trouble with that process, or with your existing subscription: cookcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Visit us on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, too. And for New Yorkers who'd rather not cook at all this weekend, take a look at Nikita Richardson's picks for where to take all kinds of moms out for a meal, from last week's Where to Eat newsletter.

Now, it's nothing to do with sourdough or red-braised pork, but my colleague Willy Staley's Times review of Amy Odell's new biography of Anna Wintour is required reading. It will be on the exam. (An anecdote he recounts about how fashion editors sometimes "deliberately misattribute makeup that was used in a fashion spread to a dedicated advertiser, to keep them happy," reminded me of something I saw during my own time in glossy magazines: perfume credits on fashion photographs.)

True crime in The Atavist, by Katia Savchuk: "A Crime Beyond Belief."

For The Atlantic, Ian Bogost went deep on slushies, and what makes them each different, and always the same.

Finally, a new poem in Virginia Quarterly Review: "The Transitive Property of Song," by Leah Naomi Green. I'll see you on Sunday!