Good morning. Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I’ll be celebrating with Irish tacos and chocolate Guinness cake this evening. And then it’ll be Saturday and time to make Genevieve Ko’s new recipe for clay pot rice with chicken (above).
Genevieve makes this dish with bone-in thighs and a thrilling finishing sauce, with stovetop directions that result in a deeply flavorful meal with a nice crust on the bottom and a pop of black vinegar on top. It’s proper clay pot cooking, a taste of her childhood that we’re lucky to have. Let’s all make clay pot rice with chicken this weekend, and then again and again.
(It’s a dish I’ve been cooking for a long time, albeit without a recipe. I go freestyle, marinating diced skinless, boneless chicken thighs in soy sauce, oyster sauce, a splash of sesame oil, another of rice wine, with some minced garlic, minced ginger and white pepper. I then add it all to my rice cooker with a cup of chicken stock and some rehydrated shiitake mushrooms. If you add some leafy greens when the cycle in the cooker’s complete, you’ve got a fantastic one-pot meal on your hands.)
Other recipes I’d like to mess around with this weekend include these caramelized bananas with pecan-coconut crunch, from the incomparable Yewande Komolafe. Also: the chef Chintan Pandya’s mind-blowing chicken tikka; my colleague Eric Kim’s lasagna with spinach and artichoke; and my spiritual sister Gabrielle Hamilton’s fried saltines with Cheddar and onion.
This could be the weekend for strawberry granola and, with it, a case for dried fruit — in pastelitos, for instance, or in pilaf, in the braising liquid for lamb shanks for Sunday dinner. Of late, I’ve been using dried cranberries in my salads, with salted cashews, dots of creamy Brie, lardons of bacon and plenty of croutons. And where I’m from, there are always currants in scones.
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Now, you’d have to do a fair amount of work to make it have anything to do with food, but I’ve appreciated Kelefa Sanneh’s ability to put me on to new music for a very long time. First when he was a pop critic at The Times (bringing us the Hold Steady and Arctic Monkeys, among others) and now at The New Yorker, where he recently wrote about the musician HARDY. Thanks, K.
March Madness is underway! The University of Vermont faces off against Marquette in the first round this afternoon. The Catamounts are looking for an upset, obviously.
Did you take in the second season of “Mayor of Kingstown” on Paramount+? It’s very, very dark. But Jeremy Renner’s having fun there, and Hugh Dillon’s a pleasure to watch.
Finally, Lauren K. Watel has a new poem in The New York Review of Books you ought to read: “The Island.” Enjoy that, and I’ll see you on Sunday.
