Maanchi’s cheese buldak did good business. And so did this cannellini-bean pasta with beurre blanc that Tejal learned from Jack Monroe, the British food writer.
That’s 2019, anyway. You may be looking to the months ahead, and toward the shock of the new. I’ll start with a recipe that isn’t a recipe so much as an exhortation to get into the kitchen and make something delicious, a no-recipe recipe: Chinese sausage and rice. It’s beyond simple, especially if you have a rice cooker, an exercise in shopping more than anything else. Go to your local Asian market — and there is one, look — and get some lap cheong, the generic name for hard, smoky-sweet Chinese pork sausage. Get some jasmine rice. Rinse that rice well and put it in the rice cooker. Add water. Slice one or two of the sausages into coins and add them to the pot. Cook! I eat that with steamed greens, butter and soy sauce, and life is good and fair.
Thousands and thousands of actual recipes await your consideration on NYT Cooking. Go see what you can find there. (I found this creamy goat cheese, bacon and date dip and now I’m a dip guy.) It’s true: You need a subscription to access them. You need a subscription to watch “Top Boy” on Netflix as well. Both are worth the scratch. (Bonus holiday idea: a NYT Cooking gift subscription!)
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Now, it’s a long, long way from pleasure and deliciousness, but in case you missed it on Monday, here is some extraordinary public-service journalism from The Washington Post, laying bare the secret history of our 18-year war in Afghanistan.
I loved this video from the London Review of Books, exploring the lost art of pasting up pages for publication. People forget sometimes, the labor that used to go into making a newspaper!
Finally, here’s Miranda Popkey, “The Top of Something” in the Virginia Quarterly Review, adapted from her forthcoming novel, “Topics of Conversation.” Read that, and I’ll be back on Friday.
