Good morning. Is it time for resolutions yet, or are those only made on Wednesday morning in exchange for release from headaches and anxiety, sweat and abject fear? Me, I’d like there to be more plants on my plate in 2020, and smaller portions of meat. I’d like to cook with more nuts and seeds, with more tofu, with more mushrooms. I’d like to mess around with tempeh. I’ve already got my nutritional yeast. Melissa Clark’s going to tell us all about how to cook with less meat later this week. Stand by for her guidance!
But that’s not all I want to do, in this coming year. I also want to dial in my rice making, and get adept in particular at the preparation of sushi rice. I’ll serve it with egg yolks pickled in soy sauce (above), and beneath an absolute shower of salmon roe as in the Japanese dish ikura don. I’ll do that a lot, I hope.
The list continues and continues, grows larger in ambition and smaller, too, at once. I want to build and cook on a disco, what some call a Mexican wok. Likewise a Schwenker grill. And a Jamaican jerk pan. Is this the year of the outdoor pizza oven? All I can do is make affirmations, and hope time opens up.
It’s O.K. if it doesn’t. Here’s to making my own yogurt instead, and to keeping my kombucha strong. Here’s to breadmaking and vinaigrette in bulk. Mostly, though, here’s to attempting kindness every day, to welcoming strangers, to championing the delicious while feeding the hungry, to understanding the world through food.
That seems doable, no? We’re here to help. There are thousands and thousands of recipes to cook this year on NYT Cooking, alongside explanatory guides to particular kinds of cooking as well: how to make pizza, for instance, and how to cook cauliflower; how to make chili; how to drink wine.
You could come to us to make ramen carbonara, to put together a sheet-pan harissa salmon with potatoes and citrus, to stir up a red lentil soup with lemon. I think you might like this three-cup chicken.
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Now, it has precisely nothing to do with garlic or duck confit, but Colm Toibin wrote about the Elton John memoir for the London Review of Books and so of course you should read it.
You do listen to Kara Swisher’s podcast, don’t you?
Here’s Khruangbin live at a jam band festival in Virginia this summer, and if you’re in need of chill this week, the video is a good way to space out for a while. Put your headphones on and listen loud.
Finally, I got to talking to someone the other day about the editor Corlies Smith and a novel he edited for Jimmy Breslin, “Table Money,” from 1986. I went home and pulled it out and it’s about four times better than I remembered it and I liked it well enough to keep it on a shelf most of my life. Go find a copy at the library, or the used bookstore that’s the good one in town and not the other one. You’re welcome. I’ll be back on Wednesday.
