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Weekend simmers for weeknight dinners
Hello! Happy Saturday. I always try to save a bit of my weekend for meal-prep cooking. I don’t mean any sort of big production — there are no stacks of waiting plastic containers, multiple pots going on the stove or a sheet pan on each rack of the oven. (Just typing that makes my chest tighten a bit.) Instead, I aim to have just one thing in the fridge on Sunday night, ready for the week. The leftover breasts from a whole roast chicken, the legs already eaten. A jar of salad dressing. The other night I made a double batch of rayu (Japanese chile oil), and just knowing that it’s sitting in my fridge, waiting to adorn fried eggs or roasted vegetables, makes me happy. With that in mind, I think you should make hóng shāo ròu (red-braised pork belly) this weekend. I asked Margaux Laskey, who adapted the recipe from “My Shanghai: Recipes and Stories From a City on the Water” by Betty Liu, for her thoughts. “It’s just so, so satisfying to watch it transform into this glossy, lacquered pile of pork that falls apart when you pierce it with a fork,” she said. “It’s deeply flavorful and kid-friendly because it’s salty-sweet.” The Sunday dinner it yields alone would be worth it, of course, but just imagine the leftovers waiting for you for lunches, dinners and breakfasts, with rice, noodles, eggs or veggies. A few hours of weekend simmering provide a delicious-smelling kitchen and little moments of joy. “Begin tasting the braising liquid at the two-hour mark; if it’s too sweet or salty, add more soy sauce or rock sugar until the flavor makes you do a little dance,” Margaux writes in the recipe. I imagine you might also do a tiny happy wiggle when you crack open leftovers at the office on Monday. Featured Recipe Hóng Shāo Ròu (Red-Braised Pork Belly)Today’s specialsSpicy sweet potato chowder: I’m sure someone out there knows the exact demarcations between soups, stews and chowders, and I’m doubly sure that person might sniff at our calling this new Ashley Lonsdale recipe a chowder. (There’s no dairy, corn or seafood, for instance.) Whatever you’d like to call it, this dish of sweet and new potatoes, habanero chile and snap peas, simmered in coconut milk and zipped up with lime, sounds plenty delicious. One-pot white wine pasta: Add “one-bottle” to the name of this Ali Slagle dish, because you cook the pasta in one (750-milliliter) bottle’s worth of dry white wine. This, along with the anchovies, butter and chile flakes, gives the dish a really lovely complexity and offers you the opportunity to make some really primo dad jokes about the pasta being sauced. Haemul pajeon (seafood scallion pancakes): The grocery store near me carries a nice “seafood mix” in the frozen section, a combination of squid, shrimp and shucked mussels. It’s perfect for all sorts of spicy tomato seafood, and will be called into action for these scallion pancakes from Eric Kim. I’m excited to make these at home, given that I always order them when I spot them on menus — their golden, crisp edges and soft, chewy, oniony interiors are impossible to resist. If you’d like a vegetarian jeon option, try Eric’s gamja jeon (potato pancakes).
And before you goOne last weekend cooking suggestion: dumplings! This past week was Dumpling Week, with five new recipes to ring in the Lunar New Year. Gather your pals or family for a dumpling party — or block off some dumpling-folding alone time. I made Sue Li’s pork and garlic-chive potstickers, but with ground chicken instead (they were fantastic). I’m now eyeing Eric’s recipe for wang mandu. A bit of gentle dough kneading, rolling and filling sounds like just the thing for a Sunday in late February.
Thanks for reading!
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