What to Cook This Weekend

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/dining/what-to-cook-this-weekend.html

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Good morning. Two weekends to go before the Christmas-Hanukkah rush, and already my inbox is full of questions about roasting geese, baking hams, making cookies and choosing gifts to buy. (For myself, I’ve been messing around with this skillet from Blanc Creatives for a month now. I know it’s expensive, but it puts the amor in amortize. I’m in!)

So it might be a good weekend to sketch out a plan for the holiday week — a dinner to cook on Dec. 24; breakfast shenanigans for the 25th and 26th; maybe even a feast for New Year’s Eve. (May I suggest a beef rib roast and some Yorkshire pudding?)

But you could also cook for yourself and those you hold close, offering lunches and dinners that celebrate the relative chilliness of the season. (At least if you don’t live in the Florida Keys. For you, Yucatán shrimp, a dish I learned to love and eventually cook at Randy Wayne White’s road house bar on Sanibel Island. Pair with cold, cold beer and an afternoon nap in the sand.)

How about a meatball and sausage casserole for dinner? Pierre Franey came up with the recipe years ago for his six grandchildren. It abides.

Or you could make Mark Bittman’s recipe for spicy roasted chicken thighs. Me, I’d pair them with braised greens, good bread and a chilled lambrusco.

Have you made Melissa Clark’s recipe for French onion soup with garlic-Gruyère croutons? It’s just great, though you might prefer Jonathan Waxman’s legendary roast chicken, maybe with Mark’s recipe for glazed carrots with orange and ginger.

You could make billi bi, the outrageous mussel soup, and use the leftovers to pour over a bowl of al dente spaghetti the next night, a move we learned from the dapper newsman Bill Schmidt.

Or if clams appeal more than mussels, you could make linguine with littlenecks, roasted tomatoes and caramelized garlic: “Saturday Night Fever” on a plate.

Head on over to Cooking to see if there isn’t something else you’d like to make this weekend. Choices abound, and we’re adding new ones almost every day. And of course you may find recipes elsewhere – I like this recipe I found in Lucky Peach for a Franco-American take on Mexican birria, piled into a kind of French dip sandwich. I saved that to my Cooking recipe box, and you can, too, if you follow these instructions.

And, please, always: read. Here’s Daniel Duane on eating with the food scientist Harold McGee, in The California Sunday Magazine. You’ll want, too, to dip into David Sax’s “The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter,” skillfully reviewed this week in The Times by Michiko Kakutani. And leave time for Jane Kramer, writing in The New Yorker about Yotam Ottolenghi’s feast for Jerusalem at the Met.

Have a great weekend. We’re here if you need us: cookingcare@nytimes.com.