Good morning! Today we have for you:
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A hearty but light slow-cooker chicken dish
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Versatile cold noodles with a spicy peanut sauce
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Plus, Yewande Komolafe’s new recipe for stir-fried pork and plums
Good morning. It was around 25 years ago, as near as I can figure it, that a woman named Robin Chapman came up with the slow-cooker dish that would come to be known as Mississippi Roast: top round beef simmered with butter, pepperoncini, ranch dressing and gravy. The dish has been an internet darling pretty much ever since.
Folks make Mississippi Roast with pork, with venison and elk. I’ve even seen a vegan version, made with jackfruit. All excellent. But my current favorite, light enough for summer, is Kia Damon’s new recipe for Mississippi chicken.
Kia eschews the packaged ranch seasoning and au jus powder that gave the dish its original tang and oomph, replacing them with soy sauce, garlic and a ton of fresh herbs. But she doesn’t stint on the peppers or butter, so it’s still recognizably (and tastily) an heir to the original. I like it with rice, cornbread and the greenest green salad. You might scatter some fresh or frozen peas into the mix at the end, for sweet pops of flavor against the salty richness of the sauce.
Featured Recipe
Mississippi Chicken
Get that going after lunch, and you’ve got Sunday dinner sorted. As for the rest of the week. …
Monday
There’s something both light and substantial about Hetty Lui McKinnon’s recipe for a cold noodle salad with spicy peanut sauce. She uses the Japanese buckwheat noodles known as soba because they’re in the running for best-tasting cold noodles, with crunchy vegetables — I like cabbage and carrot in addition to her cucumbers and radishes — and a marvelously fiery peanut sauce that you could make with any nut or seed butter. Leftovers make for an awesome desk lunch the next day.
Tuesday
Andy Baraghani takes miso salmon to a whole new level in his recipe for a sticky miso salmon bowl, bringing grapefruit, honey and ginger into the mix to create a marvelous almost-crust on the fish that goes beautifully with butter-touched rice cut through with sliced scallions. You may put that one on repeat for the rest of summer.
Wednesday
I like Sherry Rujikarn’s recipe for pork laab for its essential simplicity. The most complicated part, and it’s not very complicated, is toasting the uncooked jasmine rice and grinding it into powder with a mortar and pestle. Add that to cooked ground pork, a ton of herbs and vegetables, with some ground red chiles for heat and a healthy splash of fish sauce and lime juice, and off you go into the realm of the delicious.
Thursday
Are there beautiful tomatoes at the market? I hope so. Because I’ve been dreaming of Melissa Clark’s tomato sandwiches for weeks now, rich and garlicky and sweetly acidic. Will I follow her lead and layer a few slices of thick-cut bacon into the sandwich? I will!
Friday
And then you can head into the weekend with Yewande Komolafe’s new recipe for stir-fried pork and plums, sticky, tender and beautifully caramelized at the edges. It’s an excellent use of pork belly, rich and unctuous, but you could substitute pork rib tips if you wanted something leaner. Serve over arugula or another peppery green, with steamed rice.
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Now, you’d have to do some complicated engineering to land it in the basket of anything to do with food, but it’s cool how Harper’s opens up its archives to highlight old classics. For instance, here’s Lorrie Moore’s 1998 short story, “Lucky Ducks.” Read that while your chicken burbles along in the pot.
Another look back: Willy Staley in The New York Times Magazine, on how Hulk Hogan’s 2013 lawsuit against Gawker reshaped the entire landscape of the media business.
I burned through Brad Thor’s “Edge of Honor” the other day on a milk-train voyage east from Brooklyn to parts fishy and unknown. It’s kind of unsettling, certainly timely.
Finally, it was 63 years ago this weekend that Robert Zimmerman legally changed his name to Bob Dylan. “Some people get born, you know, with the wrong names, the wrong parents,” he told Ed Bradley of CBS in 2004. “I mean that happens … You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” I’ll be back next week.
Sam Sifton is an assistant managing editor, responsible for culture and lifestyle coverage, and the founding editor of New York Times Cooking.
The post A Lighter Take on a Slow-Cooker Classic appeared first on New York Times.
