Good morning. Gabrielle Hamilton has an elegant jewel box of a column in The New York Times Magazine this week, about cooking for loads of children at a sleepaway camp, and the joy of hiding out there in the woods making food for a crowd. To go with it, she gave us a recipe she learned from one of the cooks she hired that summer, a Jamaican man named Shaun Lewis, for jerk chicken (above).
Gabrielle writes about that chicken better than I ever could: “It’s not spicy hot but has a magnificent warmth that spreads across your chest in a slow build. I would like to insist that there is no substitute for the low-and-slow smolder of a live charcoal fire — it’s the smoke you can’t live without — but I’ve cooked this in cast iron on a stovetop, on the grates of my restaurant’s flawed indoor gas grill and on sheet pans in a blasting convection oven, and still it slays.”
On the side: Her quick-pickled fresh ripe bananas that deliver creamy sweetness alongside a big spike of vinegar and habanero. Oh, man. Add some coconut rice with peas from David Tanis (I’d swap in pigeon peas for the green ones, myself), and you’ve got a Saturday night dinner plan right there.
I’d like to arise on Sunday sated from the feasting, make a smoothie of bananas, strawberries and frozen mango chunks, and get out to a farmstand or market for good tomatoes and a big thatch of basil, so lunch can be Alexa Weibel’s new recipe for a roasted tomato tart with ricotta and pesto. The dough’s a snap: It’s frozen puff pastry.
And for dinner? Lobster pasta with yellow tomatoes and basil. That is fancy material, no question, but not so expensive as we all agree to believe, looking at the market prices in restaurants. That price is for one-time use. But if you buy the lobster you need for the dish from your fishmonger, you can use the shells to make stock, and use that stock for clam chowder in coming days, or lobster bisque, or lobster risotto, and you’ve amortized the cost substantially.
I get it, though, if you’re not game to play. Make some cheese enchiladas with chili gravy instead, and you’ll see a food cost lower than $4 a person, cold beer included. Or take a spin through our collection of recipes for cheap eats for those on a budget, or for those yet to pay the August rent. We make no judgments here.
Karaage, the Japanese fried chicken, would be aces to cook this weekend. So would a peach upside-down cake. Or you could, at long last, learn how to grill really well.
There are thousands of other ideas for what to cook this weekend on NYT Cooking, though you’ll need a subscription to access them. (We need you to subscribe so that we can keep doing this. Please spread the word!)
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Now, it’s a towering fly ball from kitchens and pantries, wine shops and pick-your-own fruit stands, but my mom turned me on to “Banking District,” a French-language suspense series about an ancient Swiss bank and banking family, and it’s pretty strong. Check that out.
Frederick Seidel has a new poem in the London Review of Books, “Moto Poeta.”
Finally, see what you think of this BBC yarn about the role mushrooms play in our lives and world, now and perhaps going forward. Have a great weekend. I’ll see you on Sunday!
