Good morning. I’d grilled 50 cheeseburgers, as many hot dogs, 18 brats and six veggie burgers, all of it over charcoal on one of those Americana grills you can get pre-assembled at the big-box store for less than it costs to buy a single porterhouse at Gallagher’s in Manhattan. It was a glorious service for kids, parents and grandparents, everything perfumed with smoke and consumed with supermarket salads and chips, a terrific reminder of the pleasures of cooking outdoors for people you care about deeply. I could do that all summer and be happy.
But not every week. Overdo it with live fire and commodity ingredients and you’ll find yourself bored. There’s a reason cookouts are special. They’re treats. If you had to cook that way always, they wouldn’t be.
So this weekend, I’m sticking to the kitchen in the house. On the docket for dinner tomorrow night: pad prik king (above), a dry Thai chicken curry made with red curry paste and makrut lime leaves. If I can find some Chinese long beans at the market where I generally get the lime leaves, I’ll use those as well, though if you can’t, the dish works nicely with European green beans. Jasmine rice on the side, please.
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Pad Prik King (Red Curry Chicken and Green Beans)
For breakfast the following morning: the blueberry muffins that used to be served at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. There’s a terrific story behind that recipe. It’s an adaptation of one published in 1847 by Esther Howland in her “The New England Economical Housekeeper, and Family Receipt Book,” a 19th-century best seller that was essentially the “How to Cook Everything” of its time.
Tuna salad sandwiches for lunch? Or peanut butter with sriracha and pickles? A spring barley soup might be more elegant, just the thing to eat after a long walk to follow the muffins. (But I wouldn’t turn down a seasonal antipasto platter, myself. To eat one of those on a porch, stoop or rooftop is a good approximation of paradise.)
Then, for dinner: sheet-pan pizza al taglio, a crisp-edged Roman pie that I like to top with arugula when it comes out of the oven, along with a scattering of anchovies. Unlike a Neopolitanish pizza dough that benefits from a long ferment, the al taglio dough comes together nicely in an afternoon, so if you get started after luncheon, you’ll be in very good shape come dinner.
Serve strawberries afterward, with Swedish cream.
There are many thousands more recipes to cook this weekend waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Go see what you find. Of course, you need a subscription to do that. Subscriptions are the fuel in our stoves. If you haven’t taken one out yet, would you consider doing so today? Thank you.
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Now, it’s not precisely about cooking food so much as its consumption, but a few days on the road recently introduced me to some new options in the fast-food universe. And while I’m generally Mr. Positive, I’m here to tell you: Sheetz, the gas station, convenience store and made-to-order sandwich empire in western Pennsylvania, is just terrible. It’s a Temu version of Wawa that makes Subway look like an All’Antico Vinaio. (Maybe I went to the wrong Sheetz?) I managed two bites of a club sandwich on a pretzel roll before wrapping the thing back into the bag and launching it into the back seat of my truck.
On the other hand, a box combo of chicken tenders, fries, coleslaw and Texas toast from Raising Cane’s? Not bad! The Cane’s Sauce that comes with — as near as I can tell, a mixture of ketchup, mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, garlic powder and a metric ton of black pepper — is going to be on heavy rotation for me this summer as a burger condiment. Try that.
My pal Mahler turned me on to History Facts’s accounting of “Six Weird Sandwiches People Used to Eat.” I’ve consumed all of them!
Finally, Jon Pareles, in the invaluable “Playlist” column in The Times, introduced me to Guedra Guedra, “Drift of Drummer.” Listen to that while you’re cooking. I’ll see you on Sunday.
Sam Sifton is an assistant managing editor, responsible for culture and lifestyle coverage, and the founding editor of New York Times Cooking.
The post Got a Can of Curry Paste? Make Pad Prik King. appeared first on New York Times.
