Good morning. I find it’s the condiments keeping me humming along in the kitchen these days, shortcuts to complexity, a way to bolster flavor with stuff from a jar. I wrote about them for The Times this week in an ode to chile crisp, a Sichuanese concoction that marries fire to texture with incredible results.
The recipe that accompanies the words: a roasted tofu and green bean sheet-pan dinner (above), to serve with rice. It’s fantastic, but if you don’t have chile crisp, you could try a similar cooking technique with peanut butter and miso that Yewande Komolafe ginned up for us a while back, equally delicious in an entirely different sort of way. Or, failing that, do give Mark Bittman’s recipe for stir-fried chicken with ketchup a try. (It’s a nod to an old Suvir Saran recipe for Manchurian cauliflower.)
Cook with condiments even if you don’t have a recipe, only a bunch of ingredients in the fridge. For instance, to make dinner the other night I thawed a vacuum-packed bag of pork chunks left over from my friend Nick Rubicco’s 2019 experiment in animal husbandry — a pair of pigs named Peanut Butter and Jelly he raised in his yard in the Catskills and harvested in the fall. I seared the beautiful, marbled stew meat in a Dutch oven, then sprinkled dried ginger over it because I didn’t have fresh. I added a few cups of stock in which I’d simmered some kombu to the pot, though if you don’t have kombu so be it. Then I added chopped sweet potatoes, carrots and white potatoes and crucially a quarter-cup each of mirin and soy sauce. I let the whole thing simmer for an hour, and it resulted in an insanely good meal. Riff on that as you will.
Other recipes worth examining in these days of heartache and anxiety: Dawn Perry’s new pantry pasta recipes: for fast spaghetti Bolognese; for blistered broccoli with walnuts and pecorino; and for brussels sprouts with bacon and vinegar. Alternatively: spring minestrone with kale and pasta; creamy cauliflower pasta with pecorino bread crumbs; three-cup vegetables. And, for pure pleasure, give these peppermint brownies a whirl.
Thousands and thousands more ideas for recipes to cook right now or real soon are on NYT Cooking. Many more than usual are free for the browsing and cooking, even if you’re not a subscriber. (Naturally, we’d be pleased if you were a subscriber, all the same.)
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Now, it’s a far cry from mayonnaise and whole-grain mustard, but as always the royals provide distraction from the perils of real life. Here’s Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker, on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s fractured fairy tale.
You’ll want to spend time with our T Magazine’s new culture issue, and with At Home, our collection of distractions and helpful links to our best suggestions for living life well under lockdown.
Here’s Fiona Benson’s poem, “Mayfly,” in the London Review of Books.
Finally, I ran into a couple of barn swallows the other day, and they’re my new jam: super sleek and iridescent. Check them out, and see if you can’t find a few near where you stay. I’ll be back on Friday.
