Good morning. Recipes are sheet music. Cooks are musicians. They interpret the notes differently; they play the chords differently. Arrangements can change on the fly. My Boston baked beans taste different from Amanda Hesser’s now that I’ve made the dish a gajillion times. They’re both excellent, though. They’re both the same recipe.
That is very much to the good. It’s what makes cooking a creative act rather than a rote one.
Take my recipe for oven-roasted chicken shawarma, which lots of people make. (More than 17,000 readers have given it a rating on New York Times Cooking.) I’ve been making it for friends and family for nearly a decade. The other night my daughter made it for me. It was utterly fantastic, and utterly her own — more lemony than mine, a little warmer in spice, the meat cut a little differently — even though she followed the recipe exactly. I loved it. I’d love to taste yours.
Featured Recipe
Oven-Roasted Chicken Shawarma
So that’s my dinner tonight and, if you’re taking up the Well desk’s Mediterranean diet challenge this week, it could be yours too. (Sign up today and you’ll get a week’s worth of email guidance, shopping advice and recipes.)
As for the rest of the week. …
Monday
I love Melissa Clark’s recipe for easy lentil soup, especially when I make it even easier by cooking it in a pressure cooker: Reduce the amount of stock used to three and a half cups and cook on high pressure for 12 minutes, with a natural release. Serve with crumbled feta or a dollop of sour cream.
Tuesday
Here’s a lovely, largely hands-off recipe for crispy tofu and broccoli with ginger-garlic teriyaki sauce from Hetty Lui McKinnon — no frying required. You just dip the tofu in neutral oil, dust it with cornstarch and get it into a hot oven. The broccoli joins it on another pan while you’re making the glossy sauce. So good.
Wednesday
I like my no-recipe recipe for amatriciana on the fly even more if there’s guanciale in the fridge, jowl bacon in place of the regular stuff. It’s a superb weeknight feed.
Thursday
Tejal Rao’s adaptation of the recipe for the pickled mushroom salad at Marlow & Sons, in Brooklyn, is an ace wintertime dinner if you pair it with thick cuts of toast and dollops of crème fraîche. If you can manage to do the pickling in the morning before work, allowing the mushrooms to sit and cure in the fridge all day, so much the better.
Friday
And then you can head into the weekend with Naz Deravian’s new recipe for massaman curry. It’s rich, mildly spicy and thicker than most other Thai curries, with an amazing balance of sour, sweet, spicy and salty that’s fantastic over jasmine rice.
Finally, a Sunday snarl: Liam Gallagher paired up with John Squire of the Stone Roses for “Just Another Rainbow.” It’d be a very different song if it were, say, Michael Stipe singing it. Which is to say: Cook your own way. I’ll return on Friday.
