Today we have for you:
Lemon-pepper wings, an Atlanta classic
Good morning. I spent a fine few days in Atlanta recently, eating spectacularly up and down the price ladder. At Miller Union I had a field pea and peanut salad with tomatoes, peppers, ricotta and mint that was mind-bendingly good. It’ll probably take me a month of Sundays to come up with even a bad cover-band version. But I’ll work on it! This weekend, though, I’ll take a run at the city’s vaunted lemon-pepper wings (above), alongside an attempt to recreate the shockingly good biscuits Erika Council bakes at her Bomb Biscuit, near the beautiful Oakland Cemetery in Grant Park. The key with those biscuits, I suspect, is super high-fat butter and a lot of practice. Here’s my recipe, which is a start. For the wings, I’m going with flats, rather than drumettes, roasted in a hot oven until they’re shatteringly crisp, then tossed with lemon-pepper seasoning that sits astride the sweet-and-sour divide in the manner of a king. Serve them as is, or what they call in Atlanta wet, with Buffalo sauce. You’ll see. Featured Recipe Lemon-Pepper Chicken WingsAlso this weekend: a black pepper beef and cabbage stir-fry, spicy sweet, with a mound of rice. I’ll make Marian Burros’s original plum torte, too, a September tradition at The Times since 1983. And maybe some smothered pork chops in lemon-caper sauce as well, to go alongside a platter of Hasselback potatoes. (My pal Big Mike makes those accordion-style, the potatoes cut on both sides, and roasts them in a combination of clarified butter and olive oil. I think the only way to improve upon that is to use duck fat.) This could be a weekend for lemon ricotta pancakes, for morning glory muffins, for super-creamy scrambled eggs. I’ve been searching for an Italian hero that’s better than the one you can get at Delfiore Pork Store in Patchogue, on Long Island, and failing. So I’ll make my own, on Caputo’s bread, and congratulate myself. And a chicken tagine for Sunday supper? Yes, please, in advance of a tarte Tatin to welcome the coming fall season. There are thousands more recipes to cook this weekend waiting for you at New York Times Cooking. Reach out for help if you find yourself in a jam with our technology or caught crosswise with your account. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com and someone will get back to you, I promise. Or, if you’d like to raise a complaint or deliver a compliment, you can write to me. I’m at hellosam@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter, I’m sorry. (There’s a lot of mail.) But I read each one I get. Now, it’s nothing to do with allspice or chicory, but I came across Rachel Khong’s 2024 novel “Real Americans” the other day and inhaled it: sprawling, dark and rich. Sam Thielman’s review in The New York Times Book Review, meanwhile, put me on to Lee Lai’s graphic novel, “Cannon.” Ivy Knight, in the Oxford American, has a fascinating piece on the restoration of a mural the artist Banksy put up in New Orleans a few years after Hurricane Katrina; the work was later defaced with red paint. Spray paint on spray paint. It wasn’t easy. Finally, here’s Yo La Tengo with “Autumn Sweater,” from 1997. Listen to that while you’re winging it. I’ll see you on Sunday. For a limited time, you can enjoy free access to the recipes in this newsletter in our app. Download it on your iOS or Android device and create a free account to get started.
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