Good morning. Naz Deravian brought us a great new recipe for chicken satay (above), adapted from one developed by the Canadian cookbook author and YouTube personality Pailin Chongchitnant.
You could make it with marinated steak tips or chunks of pork instead of the chicken. You could make it with firm tofu. Truth be told, you could make it with a box of pink pencil erasers and have a very good meal.
The sauce is the thing here. It’s rich and creamy with roasted peanuts, coconut milk, red curry paste and tamarind, incredibly spoonable, tempting to eat like soup. And it marries beautifully with the spicy quick-pickled cucumbers known as ajaad. (Naz provides a recipe below the one for the sauce.) Serve those two with whatever protein (or latex-free rubber) you like, and you’ll find yourself with another gem in your repertoire, a dish to make monthly at least.
Featured Recipe
Chicken Satay
That’s Sunday sorted. As for the rest of the week …
Monday
I was partial to batter-fried shrimp in my shrimp tacos until I discovered Yewande Komolafe’s recipe, which calls for marinating the crustaceans — in a mixture of cumin, cayenne, onion powder, garlic, black pepper, a wisp of kosher salt and a tablespoon of oil — before searing them crisp in a skillet. Serve in warm corn tortillas with quick-pickled cabbage and guacamole. Oh, my.
Tuesday
Hetty Lui McKinnon put together an excellent new recipe for yuzu-miso soba noodle soup. You can get yuzu juice at most Asian markets and always online. But if you find yourself without it, use lemon juice instead, adding it to the miso broth incrementally until it tastes balanced and fresh. Then garnish with lemon slices and go to.
Wednesday
There may be no more nostalgic member of our merry band than Eric Kim, whose recipe for Salisbury steak manages to evoke a dinner eaten on a folding table in front of a black-and-white television — a really good dinner, in fact, luxurious and gravy-rich, with mashed potatoes and sautéed greens. It’s old-school, and sometimes that’s the right school.
Thursday
I love Martha Rose Shulman’s recipe for mushroom risotto with peas because it’s simple yet surprisingly deluxe. Martha calls for using either finely chopped onions or shallots as the base. I think the right call is shallots, mostly because their slightly garlicky zing complements the mushrooms beautifully.
Friday
And then you can head into the weekend with a fine taste of the Midwest: Dan Pelosi’s recipe for baked mostaccioli, a tomato-rich pasta dish similar to baked ziti but made with smooth mostaccioli pasta instead of penne, always with crumbled sausage, and topped with mozzarella and Parmesan. I might St. Louis the situation and put some Provel on there as well.
There are many thousands more recipes to cook this week waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Go see what you find. (You’ll need a subscription, of course. Subscriptions make the whole operation possible. If you haven’t already, would you consider subscribing today? Thanks.)
Please write for help if you run into issues with your account: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or you can write to me if you want to cheer or complain: hellosam@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read each one I get.
Now, it’s a considerable distance from anything to do with Bresse chickens or hard-shell Maine lobsters, but it was a true delight to read, in The New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner’s assessment of “The Last Manager,” John W. Miller’s biography of the legendary Earl Weaver of the Baltimore Orioles. “Once computers came along, you didn’t even need a manager anymore,” Miller writes, per Dwight. “You could just program them to think like Earl Weaver.”
Chris Crowley, for New York magazine, went deep with Doug Corwin, the last duck farmer on Long Island, who recently lost 100,000 birds to an outbreak of bird flu. He’s vowing to come back. “I like growing ducks,” he told Crowley.
It’d be fun to fly to London soon, take in this Leigh Bowery show at the Tate Modern.
Finally, it’s Method Man’s birthday. He’s 54. Here he is with the Wu-Tang Clan in “Method Man,” from 1993. Listen to that and I’ll be back next week.
