Hello! Mia here. Melissa Clark and I swapped days this week, and she’ll be with you on Saturday with a very special Cooking newsletter.
My colleague Priya Krishna has a wonderful new article for The New York Times, writing about how cooking has connected her and her mother. Priya writes: “There’s something about cooking together — doing menial, repetitive tasks like washing vegetables or measuring spices (not that my mother did any measuring) — that makes conversation and connection easier. It lowers the stakes.” Food has been a central part of her life “because it didn’t just open up a world of different cuisines — it opened up the world of my mother.”
Priya also has a new kid’s cookbook out: “Priya’s Kitchen Adventures,” a collection of kid-tested recipes that she calls “the little sister to ‘Indian-ish.’” She’s shared four recipes from the book with us: tea sandwiches, cucumber sandwiches, salmon onigiri and shahi toast, all of which would be great projects to do with the kids come Mother’s Day.
But sometimes a recipe is too good to share: It’s a closely guarded secret that gives its owner power, mystique, a sense of sorcery. Such was the case with these garlic-ginger chicken breasts with cilantro and mint, a recipe that Priya’s aunt Sonia wouldn’t even share with her daughter. But Priya got it out of her — being a daughter also means gradually and lovingly wearing down the mother figures in your life — and now we can all make these charred, spicy, slightly funky, juicy chicken breasts to tuck into rotis or to top rice or salads.
