This is Priya, once again taking over for Sam!
A few weeks ago, I had lunch at the home of our wonderful contributors Sohla and Ham El-Waylly, the hosts of the excellent New York Times Cooking YouTube series, Mystery Menu. In true Sohla and Ham style, they assembled a casually epic spread: barbecued chicken, a vinegary potato salad, butter-slathered grilled corn, macaroni and cheese, tomato salad, and milk bread. Sohla lamented how she is regularly asked to create one-pot recipes, while she prefers to eat as she did growing up — with a bunch of different dishes on the table.
The lazy cook in me was all, “But one-pot meals are the best! They save on time and dishes!” But another part of me thought that Sohla had a point. I was also raised on dinners that comprised, at minimum, dal, rice, sabzi and salad.
One-pan recipes like skillet chicken thighs with brown butter corn and chermoula shrimp and orzo will save your life on busy nights. But there is also a time and a place for more multifaceted spreads, and perhaps this weekend is it.
My partner, Seth, and I have this once-in-a-while weekend tradition with our friends Guy and Sarah. We collaborate on dinner, each providing half the meal and cooking it all together. The next dinner collaboration will be kebabs (I hope!). I have my eye on these saffron salmon kababs (above), an herbed yogurt and salad e-sharazi, which always reminds me of the kachumber that was a staple of my childhood table. I could tell you that I am finally going to attempt tahdig, but to be honest, I’m still intimidated. So I’ll make sabzi polo instead, and a big bowl of fruit salad.
If you already have dinner partners in crime in mind, text them now and make a plan!
Then on Sunday, take a break from cooking. Clean your kitchen, repurpose leftovers into lunch, grocery shop for the week. If I’m feeling ambitious — reader, she probably won’t be — I’ll throw something in my Instant Pot to have for lunch throughout the week, like khichdi. Or I’ll make home fries — with eggs, they’re the weekend breakfast of champions.
Or make yourself a treat! In her recent column for The New York Times Magazine, Ligaya Mishan reminded me of the joys of a fruit sandwich, a Japanese snack of sliced fruit enveloped in whipped cream and yogurt and sandwiched between milk bread. It has all the fun and whimsy of an Anne Geddes portrait, and it’s my kind of sweet: mostly assembly, no baking required. I learned a wonderful term, fuwa-fuwa, reading her column. It means “fluffy like a cloud” in Japanese.
Maybe I’ll make a tray of fruit sandwiches and enjoy them while catching up on something else fun and whimsical: the newest season of “Never Have I Ever,” on Netflix. My favorite lines from the show so far? “What you are witnessing right now is a fairly common phenomenon that happens to almost every teen girl. It is the moment when an unremarkable dork is given a guitar and suddenly becomes the hottest man in the world.” So real.
And finally, I am a scaredy cat when it comes to horror movies, but like many, as Gabriella Paiella wrote in The Cut, I love reading Wikipedia summaries of horror movies. I thoroughly enjoyed the one for “Bodies Bodies Bodies.” Enough to make me think, Maybe this is the slasher film I finally see in theaters!
Probably not, though. I’m baby! ’Til Sunday!
