A Taste of Berlin in Your Home

Erkan Emre, from Berlin, settled in New York in 1997 and became an architect. But he missed a taste of home, specifically doner kebab, a Turkish sandwich filled with chicken roasted on a vertical spit, with salad and condiments. There are hundreds of doner kebab stands in Berlin. Though he was born in Germany, his…

How to Build a Better Dinner

When cooking for my family at home, I rarely use recipes. Instead, I’ll pull from a collection of what I refer to as culinary building blocks. And I’m not talking about a mental library of recipes and techniques (though those can help). I’m talking about actual, physical things. Open my fridge, and you’ll find a…

What Have You Cooked?

Good morning. One thing I wish I’d done back at the start of all this — when the lockdown began and I began to cook three meals a day, seven days a week — is to have recorded the meals in a notebook, kept track of them. It’d be great to look back on the…

What I Learned From Loving Mapo Tofu

Anyone who says tofu is bland or boring hasn’t eaten mapo tofu, the intoxicatingly spicy, fragrant dish from the Sichuan Province of China. Unlike the gentle Vietnamese tofu dishes I grew up with in Southern California, “mapo,” as some casually refer to it, first captured my attention as a teenager in the early 1980s, when…

How to Make Cider Cocktails

Amber is the color of autumn in a glass, with the tender blush of a Bellini giving way to sturdier, warming whiskey-based drinks. But it’s also time for cider, now on the upswing. Cider is not only a sweetly refreshing family quaff; when fermented and alcoholic, it’s also a delicious alternative that competes with beer.…

Salty-Sweet Chicken

Hello and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes, recipes for busy people who still want something good to eat. We have reached a milestone: There are now more than 1 million subscribers to this newsletter, 1 million of us who are on this shared journey to cook our way through this crazy time. I appreciate you,…