Good morning. Julia Moskin and I have been eating together, cooking together, hammering out sentences together and just generally marveling at the great caper of a life in journalism for the entirety of my adult life. I trust her taste and judgment and, always, her recipes.
So I’m really excited this week to dive into her latest foray for The Times: an examination of beef stew and how chefs around the world interpret its deliciousness. What a weekend of cooking it could be to follow her advice and try the recipes she gathered.
Here’s a version of the classic Jewish American pot roast (above) that Mimi Sheraton, the inimitable food writer and former Times restaurant critic, developed. There’s also an amazing stew of braised short ribs with peanuts and anchovies that Floyd Cardoz, the New York chef who died of Covid-19 early in the pandemic, came up with at home after tasting a Filipino kare-kare at a staff meal: “Many flavors,” Julia wrote, “distinct but indivisible, in one bowl.”
Perhaps you’ll try the mole de olla Julia learned from the chef Pati Jinich, which would almost be a beef soup if not for the purée of roasted dried chiles thickening the sauce. Or the nihari from the chef Anita Jaisinghani: a highly spiced, collagen-thick oxtail stew that’s popular for breakfast across northern India and Pakistan. (“Nihari is the only reason I’m not a vegetarian,” Jaisinghani said when Julia interviewed her.)
Tonight, however, you may require one of our Lenten recipes for fish. Or just something relatively fast, easy and delicious, like this broccoli salad with Cheddar and warm bacon vinaigrette.
You could make stew tomorrow and eat it on Sunday, since few are the stews that don’t benefit from a day’s curing in the refrigerator, to allow the flavors to truly meld. A tartiflette, then, for Saturday night’s repast? Cheesy chicken Parmesan meatballs? Or apparently ambitiously, because it looks like a million dollars but is quite easily made, Ina Garten’s recipe for coquilles St.-Jacques? That’s a showboat of a meal, especially if you serve it with ginger-stout cake for dessert. Rich!
There are thousands and thousands more recipes to consider cooking this weekend on New York Times Cooking. You need a subscription to read them. Subscriptions are what make this whole dance possible. Please, if you haven’t already, will you subscribe today? And for a limited time, you can save on subscribing to all of The Times, including Cooking, during our All Access sale. Subscribe now to get unlimited access to our recipes and advice, plus everything The Times offers.
Write if you run into trouble with the technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Write me if you’d like to share a flower or a dart. I’m at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I cannot respond to every letter. But I read every one I get.
Now, it’s only tangentially related to food because there’s a kind of guerrilla farming effort at the center of the story, but you might try reading “Birnam Wood” by Eleanor Catton, who won the Man Booker Prize for “The Luminaries.” It’s like a Sally Rooney thriller set in New Zealand, with an Elon Musk-esque bad guy as one of the protagonists.
Also calamitous is Ivy Pochoda’s new novel, “Sing Her Down,” a meditation on violence and women that is noir of the blackest variety.
Finally, I spent a bunch of days last week drifting around the lower Florida Keys and I’m here to report a few culinary facts.
First, the fried chicken at the Dion’s in the Mobil station on Big Coppitt Key is exemplary. Second, when someone tells you that the shrimp they’re serving are Key West pinks, they’re probably not. For roast pork, rice and beans, El Siboney on Stock Island really holds up. And if you’re in a jam for lunch, there’s a quality sandwich available at the Circle K on Route 1: cranberry chicken salad on whole wheat. Righteous. File that information away, and I’ll be back on Sunday.
