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What to Cook This Week
Good morning. Gabrielle Hamilton has been cooking European and Mediterranean food at her restaurant, Prune, in New York for 20 years now, and if her home cooking is free of what she calls “equatorial or hemispheric confines,” she has definitely maintained them at work. “It has just been a nonnegotiable outline of territory on a map,” she wrote for The Times this week, “so that we all know how far we can go and what we are meant to be doing as we cook menu after menu after menu, season after season, six new menus a year.”
Now that’s changing, Gabrielle reports, on account of her obsession with zhug (above), the vibrant green Yemeni sauce that her wife, Ashley Merriman, makes at home and for the restaurant, spicy with serrano chiles and deeply perfumed with cardamom, cilantro and garlic. At home, Gabrielle writes, you could whip zhug into soft butter to top grilled lamb chops for dinner. You could mix the stuff with hard-boiled eggs for lunch. Better yet, maybe, you could blanch some tofu, then put the cubes into zhug as if you were making vegan saag paneer, without the saag or the paneer. (At Prune, she’ll use the zhug as a topping for braised lamb necks.)
What will you use zhug for tonight? Imagine it’s a pesto, or a salsa verde, and proceed accordingly, then let me know how it all turns out: foodeditor@nytimes.com.
On Monday, maybe you could make roasted cauliflower with feta, almonds and olives, mix it with farro, and call that dinner. (Afterward, make these ridiculously flavorful peanut butter and miso cookies that Krysten Chambrot came up with one morning in her kitchen, short on peanut butter but with plenty of miso on hand.)
For Tuesday, try Alexa Weibel’s new recipe for skillet spanakopita, easy and remarkably quick. You can start on John le Carré’s new novel, “Agent Running in the Field,” after dinner.
On Wednesday night, I like the idea of Melissa Clark’s new recipe for sausages roasted with grapes. I know some will not like that idea at all. Smother some pork chops instead. Cook some sloppy Joes!
Thursday, you might consider this weeknight chicken Marbella, or at any rate a fine dinner of spicy roasted-broccoli pasta, made on a sheet pan.
And then for Friday night, you could bring back that zhug and tofu number Gabrielle was on about, or assay this recipe Elaine Louie reported out for us back in 2011, for a vegan Thai green curry.
In all, that’s a nice week of eating. There are thousands more recipes for you to consider, though, on NYT Cooking. Of course, you need a subscription to access them. Subscriptions are how we fund the work that we do. (Want to double down that funding? Purchase a gift subscription for someone.)
You can see what else we’ve got going in our kitchens by following us on Facebook and Instagram, and on Twitter and YouTube. (You can follow me personally, if you like, on Instagram or Facebook.) And you can always write us for help with your cooking or our technology: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.
Now, why don’t you read Helen Rosner in The New Yorker, on “Burn the Place,” the chef Iliana Regan’s memoir, long-listed for the National Book Award?
Nothing to do with barbecue or the price of lemons, but here’s a poem by Jay Hopler in The Believer, “Requiem w/ Eye Roll.”
William Goldman’s “The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway” did a lot to make me want to cover culture in New York City. But you know what? So did this old ad for the Milford Plaza, which played during late-night TV movies when I was a kid.
Finally, to play us off, here are the Hygrades with “Rough Rider,” humid Nigerian hippie funk from back in the 1970s. History is real. You’re welcome. See you tomorrow.
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