Thoughts on outdoor griddles and recipes for the week ahead.
 | | Chris Simpson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas. |
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Good morning. I don't generally offer investment advice, but this is close to a sure thing: You should issue a buy order for a heavy cast-iron griddle if you have access to a gas or charcoal grill. You can use it to prepare outdoor breakfasts of bacon and eggs, and lunchtime grilled cheeses or impressively crisp smash burgers. At night you can make like the chef Francis Mallmann and sizzle a flattened pork butt, as in his recipe for pork and peaches. |
I cook fish on my griddle, which is far easier than grilling the fillets on the (always sticky) grate. Potatoes, too: parboiling them until almost done, then cutting them in half and cooking them on the griddle until their cut sides are golden-brown and crisp. Cubes of polenta. Spears of asparagus. Lamb chops. Rounds of pineapple. Rinse and repeat. |
Tonight's recipe: griddled cheese pupusas with curtido. They're terrific as is, but if you grate a zucchini into the cheese and mix well before pressing it into the dough? That makes an exceptional pupusa. Enjoy. |
As for the rest of the week … |
I'll follow Eric Kim's lead and make a salmon rice bowl (above): cubes of boneless fillets marinated in a mixture of mirin and doenjang, and then roasted hot and fast. Serve with rice, which absorbs both the salty-sweet glaze and the fat of the salmon to marvelous effect. |
This creamy chive pasta with lemon elevates the allium from garnish to foundational ingredient. But that can prove to be costly if you don't have chives growing in your garden or a pot strapped to your fire escape. In which case, simmer some thinly sliced leeks in heavy cream until they're soft, and proceed as you would with the chives. (Or make straightforward creamy lemon pasta instead.) |
I love this sesame snap pea-chicken salad for the middle of the week, as good a use of a chicken breast as is imaginable, with crisp-tender peas against the soft shreds of meat, in a creamy sesame dressing. Nota bene: The recipe says it makes 2 to 4 servings. But if you're serving four as a main course, the best bet is to double up on everything. |
Here's a preparation of shrimp with coconut milk that finds inspiration in elements of both Indian and Thai curries. You coat the shrimp in ginger, garlic and turmeric, then sear them and finish them off with a braise in the coconut milk. Spinach rounds out the matter, and I serve the finished dish with rice. |
More ideas for what to cook this week awaits you on New York Times Cooking. To be blunt: You need a subscription to access them. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. I hope, if you haven't already, that you will subscribe today. Thanks. |
Now, it's a long distance from anything to do with cloves or duck eggs, but please don't miss Penelope Green's obituary of Larry Woiwode, a literary star in 1970s New York who left fame behind to live with his family on a farm in North Dakota. "Most of life seems to me a religious experience," he told The New York Times in 1988. '"I mean, I guess it either is or it isn't, and for me it is." Woiwode was 80. |
Julian Lucas, in The New York Review of Books, introduced me to Ishmael Reed's 1969 satire of a Western, "Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down." I'm off to the library now. |
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