Put down the takeout menu
Good morning. I made kung pao tofu (above) for dinner last weekend, and you ought to follow me on this one. Ham El-Waylly’s recipe is an absolute stunner, even if you don’t make it with Sichuan peppercorns because you don’t have any, and absolutely if you swap in cashews for the peanuts. There’s a creaminess to the cashew that interacts beautifully with both the sauce and the tofu. Featured Recipe Kung Pao TofuI served the dish with rice, naturally, but also with chicken wings that I “fried” on a sheet pan in a hot oven, the wings coated in oil and cornstarch and salt, then tossed in butter melted with a few tablespoons of gochujang. Try that too. The combination’s delightful. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The key to a successful weekend meal is a proper cocktail hour before it: Lillet and soda, say, with some snacks to go along with the drinks. And for those, I’ve got a winner, no recipe required. The instructions came to me from the designer and hospitality wizard Steven Stolman. “Take a dried apricot,” he wrote me in a text. “Top with a little schmear of Merkts Almond Swiss Cheese spread. Sprinkle on a few smoked almonds. Put on a pretty little silver tray. People will think you’ve reinvented the wheel.” I’d never heard of that Merkts cheese spread. It’s a Wisconsin outfit, been around forever, available in a lot of supermarkets once you start looking for it. “Shelf life of gravel,” Steven told me. When I found some, I followed his lead almost exactly (I don’t have a pretty little silver tray and could fit only one almond on each dried apricot). And he was right: Folks lost their minds. It’s a really good bite, very charming, just the thing to kick off an evening. Try that this weekend as well. Also, maybe an applesauce coffee cake for breakfast on Sunday, with its crisp top and moist, flavorful interior? Then a jambon beurre for lunch? And I could absolutely see running out the weekend with one of the British chef Jamie Oliver’s best recipes, for chicken roasted in milk. (Years ago, Pierre Franey helped Bryan Miller develop a similar dish with pork, based on a meal Miller ate at the legendary Chez la Vieille in Paris. It’s not as light and flavorful as Oliver’s, with its zip of lemon and balm of sage. But it’s still pretty great.) For dessert: a “Twin Peaks” cherry pie, of course, to honor the life of David Lynch, who died this week at 78. If none of that appeals, there are many thousands more recipes to cook this weekend waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Go take a look and see what you find. You need a subscription to do that, of course. Subscriptions are what make this whole enterprise possible. Please, if you haven’t already, would you consider subscribing today? Thanks. Reach out if you need help with your account. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or if you’d like to register a complaint or offer a compliment, you can write to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read each one I get. Now, it’s a considerable distance from anything to do with allspice or plums, but you should read Susan Morrison’s profile of Lorne Michaels in The New Yorker, tied to the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live,” which Michaels has run, uninterrupted, since the very first show. The London Review of Books resurfaced Mike Davis’s 2007 essay on California wildfires, back in the news. And Molly Young, for The New York Times Book Review, delivered a cracker of a newsletter that has me seeking out Annie Ernaux’s “The Use of Photography,” written with Marc Marie. Finally, here’s new Japanese Breakfast, “Orlando in Love,” music for your aperitifs. I’ll see you on Sunday.
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