Good morning. Melissa Clark is so smart. She’s come up with a terrific new recipe for oven-poached chicken breasts that results in perfect chicken while allowing you to take advantage of the oven’s low heat to perform other feats of magic. You could make velvety garlic confit, for instance, that you can use to dress up oven-poached chicken breasts with tomatillos and jalapeños (above), or crisp shards of chicken skin to accompany oven-poached chicken breasts with crunchy parsley-onion salad. Make one of those dishes for dinner tonight, and I wager you’ll be making it all the time this winter.
Kim Severson’s no dummy herself. A while back, she ginned up this great recipe for chicken-fried steak with cream gravy that is among the greatest things to eat with mashed potatoes that has yet been devised by a human being.
As for Julia Moskin? She’s the Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson of our world, with investigative cooking skills that boggle the mind. Chicken francese, anyone? Pan-roasted fish with herb butter? A foolproof tarte Tatin? It’s cooking with comfort, when you’re cooking with Julia.
David Tanis is in the smart set, too: His glazed shiitakes with bok choy are a beautiful accompaniment to a simple roast chicken. And so is Alison Roman with her cumin-roasted salmon with cilantro sauce. Florence Fabricant? Come on now. She’s royalty here: tagliatelle with mushrooms in red wine sauce.
There are so many cooks in our kitchen. And nearing 20,000 recipes in our database. But I’m here, like a court jester, to suggest that you don’t need to listen to any of them, that once in a while you can cook without a recipe, that on Wednesdays in this space I will always encourage you to do just that. I’ll offer a narrative prompt instead, and ask you to interpret it however you like.
So, this week? Root vegetables roasted with olive oil, butter and thyme in a 425 degree oven, to serve with pork chops you’ll sear on the stove, the meat dusted in salt and pepper and rubbed with mustard, then finish alongside the vegetables for 10 or 12 minutes. Get on that, and you’ll be fine tonight, whatever hacks you add to the “recipe.”
Or go find something else entirely on NYT Cooking. (Here’s how to become a subscriber.) There is further kitchen inspiration on our Instagram, Facebook and Twitter feeds. We are standing by to help should something go wrong with a recipe or with our technology. Just write: [email protected].
Now, it’s nothing to do with pellet ice and a morning Coca-Cola, but I like this “Get Shorty” series that’s emerged on Netflix, in part for the writing and totally for Chris O’Dowd.
An office wag said Sally Rooney’s fiction was Y.A. for adults, but I ended up liking “Conversations With Friends” a fair amount, mostly because Sally Rooney is really smart. Next up: “Normal People,” which isn’t out in the United States yet. (I borrowed a copy of the British edition.) In the meantime, here’s her short story “Mr. Salary,” if you’d like a taste of her writing.
Keeping things Irish, here’s Rory Gallagher, live in 1980, “Bullfrog Blues.”
Did you hear that the macrobiotic Japanese restaurant temple Souen, in SoHo, is closing? Christine Muhlke wrote about that for us this week, and it’s so satisfying. (“On another level, this is a restaurant for people who hate not only restaurants, but food as well. Or who are at war with it.”)
Finally, do read Nikil Saval in The New Yorker, on the increasing popularity of the home garage, an increasingly deprogrammed space, a room for American dreaming. See you on Friday.
Source: Read Full Article