What to Cook This Week

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/23/dining/what-to-cook-this-week.html

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Good morning. Melissa Clark didn’t invent the sheet-pan dinner, but she did introduce a lot of people to the concept. (And our colleagues at Wirecutter determined the very best sheet pan to buy.) I asked Melissa once how many sheet pans a person needed to have, to be well equipped in the kitchen. She asked me how many I had already. I said, “Two.” She said, “Three, then.”

I asked her what she would have said if I’d said “three” in the first place. She said, “Four.” Sheet pans do come in handy, after all, both for cooking and as an organizational platform for ingredients, what the French-trained cooks call mise en place. I’m up to five now and thinking I may need six.

You’ll need only one or two, though, to cook one of Melissa’s new recipes for dinner this evening: say, sheet-pan tostadas with black beans and peppers (above); or sheet-pan spiced chickpeas with cauliflower and roasted lemon; or sheet-pan crisp tofu and sweet potatoes.

Make one of those tonight. It’s fast work at the end of the day, which’ll save you enough time this afternoon to start the dough you’ll need for a Monday night dinner of pan pizza. (The dough recipe makes enough for three pies. You can freeze two of the dough balls, if you like, and let them thaw in the refrigerator for a day or so before you need them next.) Feeling ambitious? Make the dough, then push yourself to make yogurt when you’re done, which will pay good dividends next week at breakfast time. (I like mine with maple and Cheerios full stop.) Add the sheet-pan dinner, and you’ll have had a weekend well lived.

On Tuesday night, I’m thinking you could make a meal of the California chef Cal Peternell’s recipe for braised chicken legs, which I like particularly with a heel of bread and a big green salad.

For Wednesday’s repast, will you try penne with brussels sprouts, chile and pancetta on for size? Haagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream for dessert because I like it.

Thursday, in turn, would be good for this roasted squash salad I learned to make from the boys down at Houseman, on Greenwich Street in Manhattan.

And then you can round out the week with Melissa again, this time with her pressure-cooker spicy pork shoulder, a recipe you can speed up by using about half as much pork. Cook for 60 minutes at high pressure, manual release, then shred the meat and crisp it in a pan, moistening with some of the juices from the pot. I serve that over rice.

Thousands and thousands and thousands more recipes to make this coming week are on NYT Cooking. You will need a subscription to access them. That’s O.K. Subscriptions are the new normal. Subscriptions keep folks employed.

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Now, it’s a long way from fluke quotas and the smell of fresh carrots, but I think you should take a look at this Florida story in Bitter Southerner by Jordan Blumetti, recounting the history of St. Augustine’s Fort Mose, built in 1738 as the first free black settlement in what would become the United States.

Also, see what you make of Pat Barker’s “The Silence of the Girls,” a novel that reimagines “The Iliad” through the eyes of a captured woman, Achilles’ prize of battle. She calls him “the butcher.”

Finally, it was on this day in 1980 that Bob Marley played the last concert of his life, at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh. Here’s “Exodus,” from that night. Now go cook something. I’ll be back tomorrow.