Good morning. Weekend cooking lets you slow down and embrace patience as a virtue, Bryan Washington explains in his Eat column for The New York Times Magazine this week. His subject: stew peas (above), a dish prized throughout Jamaica and its diaspora that, as Bryan wrote, offers “a chance to allow life to carry you alongside it, less an orchestra than a gauzy jam band playing well after last call.”
It’s a humble meal: kidney beans, a pig tail or knuckle, garlic, scallions and a can of coconut milk cooked down together slowly, bound together by time. You could use beef in place of the pork, or no meat at all. At the end Bryan adds spinners — flour dumplings that make the meal more than a side dish — and then serves the finished stew over rice. Weekend joy: “For more than two hours, the pot simmers until the peas have softened, bubbling their own low chatter while you fiddle with podcasts or text friends from the sofa.”
So, stew! What a welcome to Fall. Beyond the Caribbean larder, you could turn to Roy Choi’s recipe for a California-ized version of Korean galbijjim, which he learned from his mom and I learned from him. You could make a tagine-style lamb stew. Or a spicy white bean stew with broccoli rabe.
Maybe smoky lentil stew with leeks and potatoes? Or old-fashioned beef stew? I love the chef Amanda Cohen’s recipe for a charred cauliflower stew. The idea is just to gather ingredients in a pot and allow them to come together slowly into deliciousness, a buttress against chill and damp.
Alternatively, or additionally, you could use the weekend to bake: Eric Kim’s amazing maple milk bread, for instance, or Melissa Clark’s luscious apple-bourbon Bundt cake. This could be the weekend to try Yewande Komolafe’s buttermilk chess pie or, ahead of Thanksgiving, Samantha Seneviratne’s cranberry crumb muffins.
And for dinner to round out the weekend? “Look at that moon,” as Thornton Wilder put it in “Our Town.” “Potato weather for sure.” Keep the oven humming for a spread of baked potatoes, maybe with cauliflower and cheese — or, more ambitiously, with crab, jalapeño and mint, a riff on a pasta dish that Mark Ladner used to serve at Del Posto in New York.
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Now, it’s the length of an Aaron Judge home run from anything to do with cultured butter or granola clusters, but Sean Williams has a wonderful look at the art and science of skipping stones, in Outside magazine.
