jtrent238 test blog: What to Cook This Weekend

July 8, 2022

Chris Simpson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas.

What to Cook This Weekend

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. Bryan Washington is in The New York Times Magazine this weekend with a lovely paean to biscuits, along with a terrific new recipe for kimchi-Cheddar biscuits (above) that would make for a lovely late breakfast tomorrow, with some eggs and sausage if you eat such things.

I hope you'll make them — or Edna Lewis's biscuits, Melissa Clark's buttermilk biscuits, or whatever recipe you generally follow. Bryan told us why: "A good biscuit is a miracle. Its own holy ritual and a hangover cure-all. No matter how foolproof your recipe may be, or how many generations have passed it down, the moment a biscuit departs an oven follows a familiar pattern: expectation, followed by suspense, before the elation payoff. Success is immediately recognizable, weightless in your hands." That's just about right.

A big breakfast of biscuits means no lunch for me, so I'll be stoked for dinner. I might make like a Californian and grill (or oven-roast) a tri-tip roast if I can find one at the butcher (a not always easy task east of the Rockies — score a fatty sirloin roast if you can't). Serve that monster with sweet potato fries and a roasted asparagus and scallion salad, with a strawberry pretzel pie for dessert, and you'll leave an impression on your family or the friends you gather to feed.

On the other hand, this new recipe for quick soy-braised tofu with bok choy could be just as exciting, with jasmine rice and steamed ginger custard for dessert.

Maybe grilled gochujang pork with fresh sesame kimchi? I'd fold slices of that into lettuce leaves, accompany everything with raw oysters and plenty of them. I'd make a party of it. (For dessert: no-bake melon cheesecake bars.)

Or perhaps you're celebrating Eid al-Adha. In which case, we have many recipes for you — including lamb biryani for the win.

Biscuits again on Sunday would be cool, but the weekend call for pancakes is strong. Particularly since I revitalized my sourdough starter, I've leaned into this recipe for sourdough batter with buttermilk. Fact: I like those disks with warmed maple syrup and lots and lots of berries.

No lunch again? (Maybe a wee pan bagnat to eat after taking a walk in the woods or along a beach, down a quiet street, through a field.) And then a corn and celery stir-fry with pine nuts for dinner, with an apricot snacking cake that, truth be told, you could make with any stone fruit. That'd be a nice bookend for the weekend.

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Now, it's a far cry from his recipe for biscuits, and from food in general, but Bryan's been busy this week. In addition to his work for The Times, he has a fine new short story in The New Yorker, "Arrivals."

Where do you get your recommendations for new books? (Other than this newsletter, I mean: I'm currently turning pages in Daniel Nieh's "Take No Names.") Elizabeth A. Harris had a fascinating piece in The Times about the rise of TikTok as a powerful force in the publishing industry, a kind of turbocharged word-of-mouth machine.

Nota bene: All those terns you see at the beach are not always the same tern. Audubon Magazine put together a good tip sheet to help identify the four big ones.

Finally, and I know I'm late to it, but it's new to me and cool: Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief at Random House and author of "Dreyer's English," published a game with The New York Review of Books. It's called "Stet!" There are 100 cards with sentences on them. You compete with others to spot the language or grammatical errors on each. The person who amasses the most cards wins. That won't be me, but I'll try! I'll see you on Sunday.

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