Game World!: What to Cook This Weekend

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Alexa Weibel’s modern take on the classic macaroni salad.

Yossy Arefi for The New York Times (Photography and Styling)

FRIDAY, MAY 22, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

SAM SIFTON

Good morning. We’ll get to recipes soon enough, but I woke up thinking about slice pizza. I thought about waiting for two plain while crammed into the space between the counter and the dining room at New Park on Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, Queens, drinking grape drink from a paper cup in a crowd of people doing the same.

I thought about the line for brisket at Hometown Bar-B-Que in Red Hook, Brooklyn, about how the pickles taste there, when you pick them up from the paper that lines the meat trays. I thought about the fried chicken from Harold’s on the South Side of Chicago, how I woofed it down in a parking lot, standing with strangers, and about the tacos I ate next to the Kogi truck on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, sitting on the curb.

I thought about crab boils and pig picking parties, about hailing for a hot dog at Yankee Stadium, about the ham and cheese empanada I always get at the airport in Miami, flying in or out. Fish and chips in Greenwich, England, kaya toast in Singapore, a packet of smoked salmon from Take Home Fish in Neah Bay, on the Makah Indian Reservation in Washington. “Buy two,” the man told me. “You’ll eat the first one in the car.”

This was pleasant reverie until I grew mournful. I went into the kitchen and had a bowl of granola, with sliced oranges, a spoonful of yogurt. The yogurt was Greek, a little too thick, and I cut it with whole milk. The combination — hippie orange creamsicle — was outrageously good, and I bounced on the balls of my feet. I’m making new memories now, out of what I can cook myself, with what I have.

You are, too. And those are the stories we’ll tell the young when we’re really old: maybe about the lemony-herbaceous macaroni salad (above) we learned to make during the pandemic lockdown of 2020, with its bracing tartness, its salty-sweet oomph; maybe about the baby back ribs we cooked for Memorial Day; definitely about the flag cake that followed the pork.

Maybe you could lean into khachapuri adjaruli this weekend, a Georgian bread boat, filled with cheese. Or make a potato-chip Spanish omelet, just as the chef Ferran Adrià does at home. Master the blueberry cobbler they used to serve at Chez Panisse. Bring home a taste of New Orleans, with barbecue shrimp.

I’d like to try this one-pot chicken and rice number, with ginger and cumin. Likewise these vegetarian bean and cheese enchiladas, these Buffalo chicken wings, this from-scratch ranch dressing with fresh herbs. Won’t you join me?

Thousands and thousands of recipes to make this weekend are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. (We have plenty for Ramadan, and a whole collection for Memorial Day as well.) Many more than usual are free to browse even if you aren’t a subscriber to our site and apps. Still, will you consider subscribing, all the same? Your subscription allows our work to continue.

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Now, it’s a few ball fields away from red beans and rice, but Lisa Lucas of the National Book Foundation was on Twitter the other day asking for book recommendations about the French Revolution, and it got me scrambling through the bookcases for Simon Schama’s “Citizens,” which is even better than I remembered.

Rob Harvilla in The Ringer on the history and importance of Pitchfork perfect-score record reviews is very Pazz & Jop, worth reading if any of these words are familiar to you.

Jazmine Hughes in The New York Times Magazine on braiding her own hair? Excellent. Please read.

Finally, via S/FJ, I was introduced to the beautiful lunacy of Ogmios School of Zen Motoring. Art’s everywhere! I’ll see you on Sunday.