Saturday, 18 May 2024

What to Cook This Week

Good morning. I wanted to make Trini-Chinese chicken (above) for the family, but one of the kids doesn’t eat chicken anymore. I thought maybe I’d try it with thin pork chops instead, grill them hard, paint them with sauce. But the other kid shook her head. “Lamb,” she said. “And can you make it with ground? Like ground lamb?”

This dinner was shaping up to be something else. I didn’t have five-spice powder. So I swapped in some fresh Jamaican curry powder. I didn’t have hot sauce either, because Matouk’s is so good I run out all the time. I used a whole habanero in its place, diced, and a couple of carrots and shallots, same, with a pinch of brown sugar. I used a whole lot less oil to fry the meat, didn’t “paint” anything but just dumped the component sauces in the recipe into the curry-dusted ground lamb as if making sloppy Joes, and added the lime juice at the end.

I was a long way from the source material by the time I got to serving it. The meal looked, as a guy once described the sausage gravy he was serving me at a diner in Charlottesville, Va., like “one hy-eck of a mess.”

But it was delicious and the kids cleaned their plates and I went to bed happy and that could be your Sunday dinner: hack chicken? Lamb surprise? If not, you could make the original recipe. Or if not that either, there is always broccoli and Cheddar soup.

Want to stay on the soup for Monday, meatless and flavorful? I like this butternut squash and green curry number; and this coconut curry one as well, with sweet potato and kale. (Sick of soup? Have pasta with broccoli-walnut pesto instead.)

For Tuesday, you could fire up the pressure cooker or Instant Pot to make chipotle chicken pozole. That’s good.

Wednesday: Pasta alla vodka. Or make vodka sauce and use it on pan pizza. Extra cheese, please.

Thursday dinner, I’m thinking, could be lentils diavolo. It’s a smart dish. Big flavor.

And then you can finish the week on a high note, aesthetically, with Alison Roman’s ace recipe for skillet-roasted whole fish with citrus and soy. It’s a beautiful preparation in addition to being delicious.

Thousands more recipes to cook this week are arranged in a cool database that awaits you on NYT Cooking. (I like this collection of recipes for exhausted new parents. Also this roundup of recipes for our best chocolate chip cookies.) If you haven’t already, take out a subscription to our site and apps, and begin your search.

You can find beautiful pictures of food and links to news articles about food on our Instagram and Twitter feeds — and you can talk about whatever you want to talk about in our NYT Cooking community on Facebook as well. If you run into problems with that or anything else, please ask us for help: [email protected]. We’re all about service. It is why we are here.

Now, it’s a funny thing they asked me because I’m from Brooklyn my whole life, but Down East magazine brought me on as guest editor this month, to help curate their annual Maine food issue, and I think it all worked out well. Take a look.

It’s nothing to do with eating or cooking and I can’t even tell you the name of the band because it’s a profanity and we’re enjoined from using those in The Times, but one of my favorite Canada-flavored punkish bands ever has a new record out and, with it, a video for the title track, “Dose Your Dreams.”

I’ve been wrestling with Yannick Haenel’s “Hold Fast Your Crown” for a few weeks now, caught between amusement and boredom, but Sarah Lyall reviewed the novel last week and now, armed with her insight, I think I’ll push through to the end, hoping the funny wins out. Maybe you’ll join me? It publishes this week.

Finally, “Fosse/Verdon” is coming to FX real soon (Sam Rockwell! Michelle Williams! Norbert Leo Butz!) and you should watch the trailer today so you remember to mark your calendar for appointment viewing: Tuesday night, April 9. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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