Mississippi Roast two ways

Go with the internet-famous version, or make our from-scratch recipe. Both are objectively fantastic.

View in browser|nytimes.com October 6, 2024 Robin Chapman's Mississippi Roast, adapted by Sam Sifton. Melina Hammer for The New York Times Make Mississippi Roast exactly as you like it By Sam Sifton Good morning. I've been making Mississippi Roast for the better part of a decade now, ever since reporting out a story about its origins for The Times. It's an awesome meal, a set-it-and-forget-it pot roast that leads to a tangle of beef in a fiery gravy with real depth and complexity. Served over egg noodles after a wedge salad starter, it could triumph over a nonna's gravy and pasta for victory on any given Sunday. (I know. Not your nonna's.) When I started out, I made the dish as I was told to make it by the internet: in a slow cooker with a chuck roast, packages of dry ranch dressing and "au jus" gravy mix, a handful of pepperoncini and a full stick of butter. This was objectively fantastic. But for a guy who in part makes his living writing about the glories of from-scratch cooking, the packaged mixes felt a little dishonest, as if I were cosplaying a life not my own. So I started making Mississippi Roast with homemade ranch, with a gravy built out of (less) butter and flour, and with something approaching all the pepperoncini in the jar, not just a handful. This, too, was objectively fantastic, while also being true to the kind of cooking I champion. You do you — either way yields a wonderful dinner. (Lately, I've swapped the beef out for venison and accompanied the roast with fluffy Cheddar biscuits.) Featured Recipe Mississippi Roast View Recipe → With Sunday taken care of, we can look to the rest of the week. … Monday Tempeh — blocks of fermented soybean protein common in Indonesian cooking — is one of the great tastes and textures of plant-based cooking, though it's far less common than its cousins in the tofu family. Ali Slagle's recipe for sticky spicy tempeh is a wonderful introduction to its excellence, dressed in a fantastic sauce of two parts soy sauce and one part each rice vinegar, brown sugar and chile sauce. Serve over rice with sliced raw cucumber and radish. Armando Rafael for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Sticky, Spicy Tempeh By Ali Slagle 20 minutes Makes 4 servings Tuesday Andy Baraghani came up with this lovely recipe for cacio e pepe ramen, a paean to the classic Roman dish with bouncy ramen standing in for the more traditional spaghetti or tonnarelli. Stoner food for the gods, one wag said. I'll take his word for it. David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Cacio e Pepe Ramen By Andy Baraghani 15 minutes Makes 1 serving Wednesday Here's a fine recipe from Hetty Lui McKinnon for sweet and sour cauliflower that's reminiscent of classic sweet and sour dishes of the Chinese American canon, but veganized, with the wonderful crispy florets standing in for the usual pork, chicken or shrimp. Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Sweet and Sour Cauliflower  By Hetty Lui McKinnon 30 minutes Makes 4 servings  Thursday "Learning to build a pan sauce is the highest yielding 25 minutes you'll ever spend in a kitchen," the chef Gabrielle Hamilton once wrote — and it's true as houses. Make Ali Slagle's recipe for chicken piccata and you'll be pan-saucing all over the place, every week. David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Chicken Piccata By Ali Slagle 25 minutes Makes 4 servings Friday And then you can head into the weekend with a child of Tucson, Ariz., the fried burrito known as a chimichanga. Ali Slagle's recipe for the dish doesn't strictly require frying — she offers a baked alternative — but really y'oughta. Chimis for all! Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Easy Chimichangas By Kay Chun 35 minutes (fried) or 55 minutes (baked) Makes 4 servings There are many thousands more recipes to cook this week on New York Times Cooking. Browse them as you used to browse movies at Blockbuster or books at the library, and save the ones you want to cook. If you run into problems with our technology along the way, please write cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or if you'd like to complain about something, or compliment something, or simply say hello, write to me. I'm at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I can't respond to every letter. But I read every one I receive. Now, it's a considerable distance from anything to do with seared scallops or rising dough, but a kind reader sent along a very good poem by Philip Booth, "Eaton's Boatyard." It was first published in Booth's 2000 collection, "Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999." (Eaton's Boatyard, in Castine, Maine, is still humming along.) Anand Giridharadas took to the pages of The New York Times Book Review to report that he really, really did not like Malcolm Gladwell's new book, "Revenge of the Tipping Point." Appointment viewing is not dead. I'm looking forward to the third episode of "The Penguin," with Colin Farrell on Max. Start at the beginning if you haven't already. Finally, here's a neat focus challenge from my colleagues at The Upshot. They'd like you to look at "Great Bridge: Sudden Rain at Atake," a mid-19th-century print by Utagawa Hiroshige of Japan … for 10 uninterrupted minutes. I know you can do it! And I'll see you next week. 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