What to Cook Right Now

Good morning. We devoted this week’s Food section of The Times to the joys of holiday baking, with articles devoted to slice-and-bake cookies from Alison Roman, a roundup of the year’s best baking books, an examination of the strange and beautiful world of competitive cookie decorating and a look at the culture of holiday food swaps across the land.

I hope they’ll lead you to the kitchen this weekend. Maybe you’ll make Alison’s boss new recipe for chocolate-molasses cookies (above). Those are some adult cookies, kid. They’re rich and smoky: Lauren Bacall saying, “You remember things, don’t you” in “Dark Passage.” If you’re looking for sweetness and light, you won’t find them. Try Alison’s coconut shortbread cookies or her salted pistachio shortbread wedges instead.

For dinner tonight, will you try to cook without a recipe? It’s a good exercise, gets the mind working nicely and helps in the matter of kitchen confidence as well. Try a free-form pasta puttanesca: olive oil, garlic, anchovies, canned crushed tomatoes, pitted black olives, capers and red-pepper flakes, to serve over linguine or spaghetti or bucatini or whatever dried pasta you happen to have in the house. I like it with shells sometimes, for how the olives get lost in them.

It’s simple work: Sauté the anchovies and a lot of garlic in a lot of olive oil while your salted pasta water comes to a boil in a big pot. (How many anchovies? How many you got? I go minimum four, and same with cloves of garlic.) When the fish are melted and the garlic’s gone gold, add the tomatoes and stir everything together. Let that simmer a while, get a little thicker, then add the olives and capers and red-pepper flakes until it’s as fiery as you like. Taste for salt and pepper. Keep simmering and, when the pasta is done to your liking, taste again, then toss it with sauce and serve.

Want an actual recipe? How about pan-roasted chicken in cream sauce? I learned to make it in the tiny kitchen of the Beatrice Inn in Manhattan, cooking with the chef Angie Mar, and even when I made it with dried mushrooms instead of fresh, it was among the most delicious feeds I had this year.

Or a Provencal-style greens soup? Some oven-steamed salmon? I love this slow cooker coconut curry soup with sweet potato and kale. You may want just to cook a simple sheet pan dinner.

There are thousands more recipes waiting for you on NYT Cooking. (Nota bene: You need a subscription to use the site in its entirety. Please consider taking one out if you haven’t already. I want so badly to keep doing this work and it’s subscriptions that allow me to. We even offer gift subscriptions!)

More culinary inspiration may be found, free of charge, on our Instagram, Facebook and Twitter pages. (And you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram as well, if you like.) Also in Emily Weinstein’s terrific new newsletter “Five Weeknight Dishes.”

If anything goes sideways, either with a recipe or the technology, please ask for help. We monitor the mailbox at [email protected] the way this dog watches his teddy bear in the wash.

Now, it’s nothing to do with crème fraîche or Dover sole, but Kelefa Sanneh writing about boxing is a reminder of the long and storied history of New Yorker stylists engaging with the sweet science. Here he is on Saturday night’s Wilder-Fury fight in Los Angeles. (And here’s A.J. Liebling in the same magazine back in 1955, writing about Archie Moore and Rocky Marciano at Yankee Stadium.)

You might enjoy this comic-art history of the Caesar salad, by Jef Harmatz on Medium.

I’m, like, a judge on the America episode of this new cooking show on Netflix, “The Final Table”? I had fun with Dax Shepard and Colin Hanks, and we busted Andrew Knowlton’s chops and we ate a lot of turkey. See what you think.

Finally, Alec Baldwin interviewing Roger Daltrey for the Here’s the Thing podcast sent me down a rabbit hole: Here’s The Who, “My Generation,” live in 1967. See you on Friday.

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