Go for the gold: What to Cook Right Now

June 6, 2022

Andrew Purcell for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

What to Cook Right Now

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. A friend stopped by the other night with skirt steak, which struck me as a bit like a friend stopping by with a huge tin of caviar. The price of skirt steak keeps ballooning, and inflation isn't doing us any favors. I hadn't cooked with it in months. It felt like a rare and lavish treat.

I considered serving it with Lidey Heuck's salsa verde salad (above), because that's a bonkers-good recipe. I thought about making it with a lentil salad, a classic preparation from Pierre Franey. But I had ripe mangoes on the countertop and cut pineapple in the fridge, so I went with a fiery fruit salsa, no recipe required.

It was light work: I diced up mango, pineapple, red onion and jalapeños, mixed it all with the juice of a couple of limes, then sprinkled on some of the Mexican chile-lime salt sold as Tajín. (No Tajín, no problem: Just apply salt, red-pepper flakes and some zest from your limes.) We grilled the steaks over super-high heat to crust each side, and ate them sliced against the grain with the salsa and some warm tortillas.

This was a ridiculously good meal, but you could certainly make it with hanger steak or another slightly cheaper cut instead.

Alternatively, Ali Slagle has a new recipe for green curry glazed tofu. She takes a hint from the cookbook author Andrea Nguyen, who "dries" her tofu in a warm skillet instead of pressing it in towels, and then adds oil to brown it. Ali then coats the crisp tofu with coconut green curry sauce. Vegan and easy!

I could see my way to making Sarah DiGregorio's slow-cooker Dijon chicken with barley and mushrooms tonight, a kind of one-pot version of chicken in a tarragon-mustard sauce that softens the grains into something like risotto.

Maybe roasted salmon with miso rice and ginger-scallion vinaigrette instead? Pineapple-marinated chicken breasts? A one-pan shrimp and pearl couscous with harissa?

Or there's always some version of smothered pork chops to enjoy, just aces with a smashed pickle salad that combines slices of half-sours with crunchy celery and a dill-sour cream dressing.

There are many thousands more recipes waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. (And you can check out more on our TikTok, Instagram and YouTube accounts.) To answer a question that comes up from time to time: Yes, you need a subscription to access the recipes. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. Please, if you haven't done so already, subscribe today. Thank you.

We're at cookingcare@nytimes.com if you run into issues with that, or with our technology. And I'm at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I cannot respond to everyone. But I read every letter sent.

Now, it's nothing to do with canning salmon or flipping a crepe, but our Corey Kilgannon recently profiled the New York City Sanitation Department's resident artist, Sto Len. Corey's just great: "Leave it to New York to employ someone to make art about the city's trash collectors."

Here's Rick Bragg in Garden & Gun, on his lifetime love of pickup trucks.

Matthew Specktor wrote about Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward for The Atlantic, in a review of Mark Rozzo's new book about the couple, "Everybody Thought We Were Crazy."

Finally, why don't you read "Refuge," Jackie Wang's poem, from 2021? Think about that, and I'll return on Wednesday.

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