Good morning. Maangchi, the YouTube cooking star whose real name is Emily Kim, was on vacation on the far eastern end of Long Island this summer, staying in a condominium just steps from the Montauk beach. One day I went out to visit her, and she taught me to make cheese buldak (above), fiery chicken beneath a blanket of mozzarella, a Korean answer to chicken Parm.
I wrote about the experience for The Times this week. I hope you’ll read the story right now, and I hope even more that you’ll make cheese buldak this weekend, because it’s so simple to prepare and so phenomenally delicious, with rice and kimchi, and if you’re lucky maybe some of Maangchi’s ox-bone soup on the side. (You can check out her new cookbook here.)
Maangchi generally adds rice cakes to her buldak, to add texture to the dish. But she didn’t have any with her in Montauk and the only rice cakes you’ll find at the Montauk IGA are the diet snacks made by Quaker Oats. So she improvised, making these amazing little potato dumplings called gamja-ongsimi: potato birds’ eggs, is the basic translation. We ought to be making these all the time.
It’s like a magic trick. You grate a potato, then wrap the grated flesh in cheesecloth and rinse it in a bowl, reserving the cloudy water. Let that water sit until the potato starch falls to the bottom, then pour off the water and combine the starch with the rinsed, grated potato and a little salt. Make dumplings the size of, yes, little birds’ eggs out of the potato-starch mixture and then simmer them tight in water and use at will. It is a kind of alchemy: a potato that now tastes like rice.
So, cheese buldak this weekend for sure. I like vanilla ice cream for dessert after that, with a chocolate shell on top. That would be a beautiful Saturday night.
Then, maybe, some sandwiches for Sunday lunch? Egg salad? Fried eggplant? Cheddar, cucumber and marmalade? General Tso’s tofu sub?
Pan con tomate for dinner Sunday night, and a strawberry Bundt cake to follow? Or grilled rosemary pork tenderloin, with a strawberry Marsala cake for dessert? It’s cook’s choice here at the end of July.
There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook in coming days waiting for you on NYT Cooking. (Please, if you haven’t already, take out a subscription to access them.) You can also see what we’re up to behind the scenes on our social media feeds: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. And if you need help with anything, you can reach us at cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.
Now, I know you prefer it when your vegetables come from nearby farms, and not from food mills a continent or two away. But comes now news that NASA is working on plans for a space garden.
It’s nothing to do with garlic or plums, but I’d like you to meet Craig R. Stecyk III, profiled by Joe Donnelly. As a kid in Brooklyn, all I wanted to do was live the California life his art portrayed.
Here’s my next home.
Lauren Wilkinson got me excited to crack open Daniel Nieh’s “Beijing Payback” this weekend. Let’s read that and talk about it over dinner real soon.
Finally, you may recall me asking in this space for stories of Thanksgivings spent in conflict zones since 2001, stories we hope to use in a cool collaborative project with At War, The Times’s spotlight on the experiences and costs of war. Now we think the window should be wider, and we’d like to hear from readers about their experiences celebrating Thanksgiving in any American war, at any time.
We’d like to hear about the challenges faced spending the holiday away from home, memories from Thanksgivings at war, the meals enjoyed and the fellow troops with whom they were shared. Maybe that’s you? Maybe that’s someone you know? Fill out our form or forward it along. Together we’re going to learn something important. I’ll see you on Sunday.
