Game World!: What to Cook This Week

Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book.

Gentl and Hyers for The New York Times (Photography and Styling)

SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2020

What to Cook This Week

SAM SIFTON

Good morning. How are you doing? I know it’s not easy, not if you’re flying solo, not if you’re crammed into a too-small apartment with two dogs and a baby, not if you’re on a saltwater farm 17 miles from town with grandchildren romping in the soft spring grass. It’s not easy if you’re not working. It’s not easy if you’re working or going to school, either. It’s not easy for any of us. The future’s still out there, mirage-like in the distance. Sometimes it looks promising — as if summer could bring normalcy, a haircut, a trip to the crowded farmers’ market, a swim at the beach, at the pond, at the rec-center pool in town. But it’s often the opposite. Fear’s like that: awful and menacing. There’s so much we don’t know, can’t know, can’t imagine.

And so we cook. We cook to feed our bodies, to feed our imaginations, to deliver deliciousness and beauty, to make a statement that this — this roast, this galette, this focaccia garden — is something we can control. We cook for pleasure and to grant that pleasure to others, sometimes to grant it to ourselves. The other day I served a dinner of cold sesame noodles with cucumbers, peanuts and baby kale, some grilled teriyaki chicken, a bowl of incredible ramp kimchi I scored from a stranger, via a friend, delivered without contact. For once I was able to get everything sorted before sunset and we ate in golden-hour light, my family gathered close around the old wooden table, kids who were meant to be in college, at play rehearsal, somewhere else. I thought: This is stolen time we’re getting. With not much to treasure, I can treasure that.

Dorie Greenspan is riding out the pandemic in eastern Connecticut, she wrote for The Times this week, living in a small house with her husband and their son and daughter-in-law. It’s cozy there, with Dorie cooking like mad out of books she’d never opened before, or from recipes she hadn’t cooked in years, including an elegant icebox cake she calls the Moka Dupont (above) that I think maybe you should try today, for Mother’s Day, or tomorrow because it’s the day after Mother’s Day.

She learned it from a friend: four layers of plain-Jane tea cookies held together with four layers of frosting. The cookies are dipped in espresso (that’s the “moka”) and arranged on a platter, where they’re smoothed with chocolate buttercream: sweet versus bitter. “They bring out the best in each other,” Dorie wrote.

Other possibilities for the week to come: maybe, dry-rubbed London broil? Definitely the insalata verde from Via Carota in New York. Chicken with mixed mushrooms and cream? (I got a forager report from Rhode Island and another from upstate New York: Morels are here!) Also, this West African chicken with onions, citrus and chile. And if things get to be Too Much? There’s always alphabet soup.

Thousands and thousands more ideas for what to cook this week are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Many more than usual are free to use — in front of our paywall, is how we put it sometimes — even if you aren’t yet a subscriber to our site and apps. (I hope you will consider subscribing all the same. Subscriptions support our work.)

Please visit us on Facebook, if you would, and check us out on Instagram. We’re on YouTube and Twitter as well. Fun communities all. And we will leave a light on for you should you run into trouble with your cooking or our technology. Just knock: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise.

Now, it has nothing to do with pasta or cookie dough, but the other day The Times asked a bunch of showrunners, which is to say the people who make the television we watch, what they are themselves watching, while in quarantine. Their answers are inspired.

Here’s a Farah Al Qasimi photograph from 2016, “Piper at Barbeque in Houston,” in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, holy cow.

I miss Maangchi! Here’s her sweet and crunchy tofu.

Finally, here’s Deb Olin Unferth with a letter of recommendation, in The New York Times Magazine, for analog clocks. I’ll be back on Monday, same time.