Good morning. It’s cookie season where I stay, as elvish children and their parents bake away to fill old cookie tins for teachers and cousins and neighbors and friends. My colleagues at New York Times Cooking have gotten into the act themselves with seven new cookie recipes to make the holidays sing.
This weekend’s plan: Make a whole bunch of them.
Here, for instance, are Genevieve Ko’s chocolate hazelnut cookies (above). Also, Melissa Clark’s crunchy coconut twists. And Vaughn Vreeland’s gingerbread latte cookies. Wouldn’t that trio make for a fine collection for someone you love?
Alternatively, you could turn to Eric Kim’s gochujang caramel cookies, to Sue Li’s orange, pistachio and chocolate shortbread, to Yewande Komolafe’s savory olive and rosemary shortbread or to Sohla El-Waylly’s white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. Share the bounty, wrapped in a bow, and then visit our YouTube channel, where you’ll find new recipe videos for all seven cookies over the course of the next week. (The first, for Vaughn’s gingerbread latte cookies, is already up.)
Expanding on the theme, you could practice your challah baking against coming Hanukkah revelries. You could make black pepper and bourbon caramel chews, to leave out for visitors whether they come in through the front door, or down the chimney.
And for dinner? Check out these recipes from the chef Tanya Holland, who Korsha Wilson wrote about for The Times this week: gumbo z’herbes with crab and shrimp; sweet potato buttermilk pull-apart rolls; and date bars for dessert.
Keep it cozy, anyway: a chicken potpie, for instance, or this soothing butternut squash pasta with bacon and Parmesan? I like a Brunswick stew on a December weekend, as I do a Carolina chicken bog. Soy-braised tofu answers as well, as does charred cauliflower stew.
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Now, it’s nothing to do with larding a roast or frosting a lemon cake, but my old colleague Joe Sexton has a long and disturbing article in The Trace about the killing of Daniel Prude in Rochester, N.Y., in 2020. I think you ought to read it.
As you should Chloé Cooper Jones’s profile of the playwright Will Arbery, in The New York Times Magazine.
I’m late to it, but do stream the Palestinian American comedian Mohammed Amer’s charming series, “Mo,” on Netflix.
Finally, Lindsay Zoladz put me on to “Star Hill Song,” the second single from the San Francisco singer-songwriter Meg Baird’s new album, “Furling.” Cook along to that, why don’t you? I’ll see you on Sunday.
