Good morning! Today we have for you:
Spring ahead
Hello, friends. I hope this finds you well and feeling rested despite having lost an hour of sleep. I’m welcoming the upside of a longer day, the extra hour of sunshine to squeeze in some extra cooking or baking. It makes me feel like maybe, finally, I can find the time to prep something for the week ahead. This quinoa salad is where I’d start. Well, no, I’d start by roasting a whole chicken tonight, specifically Marcella Hazan’s, stuffed with the lemons a friend plucked from his tree. Half of the bird will be lovely for dinner, with bread and butter and crisp, fresh greens. The rest will make this salad the best desk lunch later this week. Of course, rotisserie chicken works just as well in this blend of quinoa, dried cranberries and parsley dressed in a mustard-shallot vinaigrette. The key to nutty, almost sweet quinoa is to rinse it well before cooking. That helps eliminate the saponins, which can leave a soapy or bitter taste in your mouth. To ensure an even tenderness for the teeny red, white and black beads, I prefer boiling them like pasta (instead of steaming). Shaking the quinoa dry in a strainer ensures it stays fluffy and ready to absorb the savory dressing. I like to skim the salad with the sauce, but some commenters like a more generous coating. If you do too, use our app’s scaling function to double the dressing, but keep all the other proportions the same. However you dress the salad, top it with the almonds and avocado right before serving. Featured Recipe Quinoa Salad With Chicken, Almonds and AvocadoHere are five more dishes you can make today for a late Sunday supper and enjoy again later in the week: Mustard-braised pork: Sundays are for sliding a pot into the oven and letting the dry heat work its magic to give you an incredible braise. That’s what happens with this pork shoulder from Christian Reynoso. He makes the affordable cut taste as rich as a restaurant dish with a simple mix of Dijon, vinegar, brown sugar and garlic. (Yup, those are all the ingredients.) Leftovers would work well in that quinoa salad in place of chicken or shredded for tacos or sandwiches. Stew lentils with spinners: Spinners taste as fun as they sound. Made from a flour-water dough, these Jamaican unfilled dumplings are rolled into tapered tubes and simmered in soup or stew. Here, Ashley Lonsdale cooks them to their tender comfort in a streamlined version of classic stew peas. By swapping in lentils, she offers a meal that’s ready in about an hour. You’ll want to eat the spinners the same night, but the leftover stew tastes great for days. Yuzu-miso soba noodle soup: This past week, the writer Martine Thompson reported on the social media trend of soup for breakfast, a practice that has been around for centuries around the world. Miso soup has long been part of morning meals in Japan and it’s worth adopting, especially if you make quarts of dashi, or broth, today. Use some for this lovely, light meal from Hetty Lui McKinnon. Yuzu juice, squeezed from a fragrant Japanese citrus fruit and sold bottled in many Asian grocery stores, is delightful, but lemon juice works well too. Baked salmon and dill rice: Naz Deravian offers a smart technique for cooking rice in a large baking dish in the oven, which allows the grains to cook evenly and provides a landing pad on which salmon cooks to juicy tenderness. I throw an extra fillet on there to have protein ready for lunch the next day. The rice, aromatic with a confetti of dill, gets polished off at dinner, it’s just so good. Otis Lee’s Detroit Famous Poundcake: Perfected over decades at Mr. Fofo’s Deli in Detroit, this poundcake is among the best I’ve ever had. Otis Lee’s son Keith Lee shared this family recipe with us; its fine crumb, light from cake flour and tangy with cream cheese, is cake perfection. The lemony cream cheese glaze on top brings out the hint of citrus in the batter. Bake this today and have a slice each day this week. 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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