Your ham plan from Sam
Good morning. What I smelled during a 10-minute bicycle ride today: wood smoke, diesel exhaust, grass, frying bacon, rotting wood, bleach, balloon rubber, dollar pizza, a tendril of burning weed, the sharpness of electrical ozone, cart coffee and, last, the strong, sweet scent of lilies — Easter in the air. Good Friday! There'll be ham this weekend, at least for some: honey baked (above) or layered into sliders with Swiss cheese and a buttery glaze. If you're amenable to the cut but didn't manage to order one for the holiday, you can make what's called a fresh ham: a pork butt scored and roasted beneath a lacquer of maple syrup and balsamic vinegar, with pecans and candied ginger. How about some Sweeney potatoes to go with it? Some creamy macaroni and cheese? Featured Recipe Honey Baked HamSome may prefer a paschal lamb, maybe butterflied with lemon salsa verde or braised with celery root purée. (I love this kind of Swedish version Craig Claiborne hustled up in the 1950s, with coffee and a sprinkling of sugar.) Others will make a carrot maqluba or the creamy spiced eggplant known in India as bagara baingan to break the Ramadan fast. Me, I'll freestyle, cooking without recipes as has become my weekend passion, working off prompts that I give myself. For example: kielbasa with pierogies, applesauce and sautéed cabbage. The kielbasa and pierogies are store-bought (though you can make your own pierogies easily enough), but the applesauce and cabbage are mine. Peel and chunk some Honeycrisps or Pink Ladies, then cook them soft in a pot with lemon juice, a cinnamon stick and perhaps a pod of star anise. These will mash together beautifully. (Remove the aromatics!) Then rub the sausage with a little bacon fat and roast it in a hot oven. Slice some red cabbage and a small onion or a couple of shallots, and cook all that in melted butter until just soft. Boil the pierogies briefly before sautéing them with butter so they go crisp on one side. Put a dollop of applesauce, a hunk of kielbasa and a serving of pierogies on each plate. Then hit the cabbage with a few tablespoons of prepared horseradish, ideally the sort cut with beets, and add the mixture to each plate. Serve with sour cream and mustard. That's a terrific meal. There are many more actual recipes waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. You do, yes, need a subscription to read them. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. Please, if you haven't done so already, would you consider subscribing today? Thank you. If you find yourself at odds with our technology, please write for help. We're staffing the inbox at cookingcare@nytimes.com, and someone will get back to you. Or you can write to me if you'd like to bark or simply say hello. I'm at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I can't respond to every letter. But I read every one I get. Now, it has nothing whatsoever to do with cloves or cocktail onions, but it's neat to see how Guy Ritchie transformed his terrible 2019 movie "The Gentlemen" into an entertaining series on Netflix, also called "The Gentlemen." Vinnie Jones as a gamekeeper? He's still a gangster, and that's the joy of it. Stephen King's first published novel, "Carrie," turns 50 this year, and Margaret Atwood wrote the introduction to the anniversary edition, which will be out next month. It's excerpted in The New York Times Book Review this week, alongside a terrific guide to "The Essential Stephen King" by my colleague Gilbert Cruz, editor of the Review. Have you been watching "Shogun" on Hulu? I'm broken to the fist but still don't know exactly what's going on. The Times's recaps of the episodes are helping. Finally, here's Olivia Rodrigo with "So American." Play that loud while you're cooking. I'll see you on Sunday!
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Friday, March 29, 2024
Your ham plan from Sam
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