A singular keema, doubles and three-cup chicken
Good morning. There’s no better weekend morning than one that begins in line at Trinciti Roti Shop in Ozone Park, Queens, waiting amid the good-natured crowd for doubles to eat in the car afterward: one goat and one oxtail for now, with all the sauces, a bake and saltfish for later and, to wash it all down, a bottle of Peardrax. It’s fuel for adventure: a long walk in Shirley Chisolm State Park, for instance, looking for snowy owls; or a ramble through Forest Park to count squirrels. I’ll think about dinner as I roam. (I always do.) Could this be the night for a pork roast with jalapeño gravy? Or for coconut red curry with tofu? Possibly. But I’ve been wanting to make Tejal Rao’s recipe for keema (above) for a while now, alongside a stack of chapati and a bowl of yogurt to dollop beside the meat. It’s simple, comforting food — ground beef simmered with caramelized onions, tomatoes, ginger, garlic, warm spices and plenty of cilantro and mint — that’s perfect for a Sunday night. Tejal never steers me wrong. Featured Recipe Keema (Spiced Ground Meat)As for the rest of the week. … MondayKenji López-Alt adapted this recipe for San Francisco-style Vietnamese American garlic noodles from the one Helene An developed at San Francisco’s Thanh Long restaurant. It’s silky, buttery and rich, and if you add shrimp to it, it’s extra special. Some folks use Maggi seasoning in place of fish sauce. Not me!
TuesdayThere’s something deeply nostalgic about Dan Pelosi’s new recipe for shake and bake pork chops, though the dish is approximately 10 times better than the version I remember from childhood, when the seasoned crust came out of a bag. Dan uses a light skim of mayonnaise on the chops to help the spiced breadcrumbs adhere to the meat. That’s a pro tip.
WednesdayGombaleves is a Hungarian version of creamy mushroom soup, smoky with paprika and dried herbs. Kay Chun’s recipe calls for a mix of wild mushrooms, though you could easily substitute white buttons. Either way, make sure to lightly caramelize them before adding the stock, which really deepens the flavor of the soup. Finish with sour cream and lemon juice. Oh, yes.
ThursdayI’ve made hundreds and hundreds of Mark Bittman recipes over the years, but if you limited me to just one, it would be this pasta with mint and Parmesan, a minimalist delight. There’s something incredible about putting the mint at center stage in a pasta dish, then charging it with butter and cheese. It’s four-ingredient perfection.
FridayAnd then you can run out the week with my recipe for three-cup chicken. If you’ve never made it before, cook it as written. Next time, you may wish to fry the chicken before you braise it, or velvet it, or make the sauce thicker, or thinner. You may prefer chicken breasts to chicken thighs, skin on or off. You could make it with scallops. After you’ve made it once, the recipe’s yours.
If you’d like other options, take a spin through New York Times Cooking and see what you discover. You need a subscription to do so, naturally. Subscriptions make this whole dance possible. If you haven’t done so already, would you please consider subscribing today? Thanks. If you have questions about your account, send them to cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or if you’d like to register joy or express disappointment, you can write to me: hellosam@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read every one I get. Now, it’s nothing to do with tempered chocolate or hard-boiled eggs, but Sarah Maslin Nir and Zachary Small had a corker of a story in The Times this week, about the influential art adviser Lisa Schiff, who stole more than $6 million from her clients, many of whom were also her friends. Here’s an interesting development in New York’s reservation wars, reported by Elizabeth G. Dunn for Grub Street: Restaurants are leaving Resy to return to OpenTable. The naturalist Bruce Beehler had a fascinating opinion piece in The Washington Post, about using genetic modification to help return the blight-ravaged chestnut tree to American forests. Finally, Post Malone joined the remaining members of Nirvana last week to sing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at the concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live.” You can find the full performance on the internet, but here’s a snippet from Post Malone’s YouTube channel. I’ll be back next week.
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