Food Blog: Your New Disco Fries

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Your New Disco Fries

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David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Your New Disco Fries

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Cathy Erway has a fascinating article in The Times this week about a new generation of American Chinese takeout restaurants and their chefs’ proud embrace of the classics of that canon: cashew chicken, for instance, along with sweet and sour pork and crab Rangoon. Maybe one of those could be your dinner tonight?

Me, I’m going to cook all three on the weekend, and this evening I’ll go with Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest, a collaboration with his test-kitchen colleague Noor Murad that nods at the fully-loaded disco fries at better diners: oven fries with tahini yogurt and smoky-sweet nuts (above). Tossing the potatoes with rice flour and oil before roasting is an awesome way to achieve crispness, and the nuts and pickled herb stems scattered across the dish before serving are a magnificent finishing touch.

If that’s not for you, take a look at this Dutch baby with bacon and runny Camembert, or this baked spinach-artichoke pasta. Or if all you can manage is assembly, pick up a rotisserie chicken and put together the chicken salad with Balsamic dressing that was served at Fred’s, the restaurant that Mark Strausman used to run inside Barneys New York. (Trivia: George Stephanopoulos and Ali Wentworth had their first date there, a fact I learned listening to the actress on “Here’s the Thing” with Alec Baldwin.)

How about a spring onion and cheese potato cake? It’s a choose-your-own-adventure recipe, made with peas and thyme or jarred peppers and harissa. A ginger-cucumber salad with scallops? Some barbecued shrimp? (They’re not actually barbecued.)

Many, many thousands more recipes to cook today or some day soon are on New York Times Cooking. (Here’s a great one for strawberry drop biscuits.) Go browse our digital aisles and see what strikes your fancy. Save the recipes you want to cook. Rate the ones you have cooked. And you can leave notes on them, too, if you like, either for yourself or for the benefit of your fellow subscribers.

Because yes, you need to be a subscriber to do all that. Subscriptions are what makes all of this possible. I hope if you haven’t already that you will subscribe today.

And please don’t hesitate to reach out for help if something goes sideways along the way, either in your cooking or with our technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com and we will get back to you. (You can also reach out to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it’s nothing to do with kale or carrots, but I still think you should spend some time with “50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue,’” in The Times.

Wow, this story in Bloomberg Businessweek about Airbnb’s crisis managers and safety team, so shrouded in secrecy that insiders at the company call it the “black box.” It’s by Olivia Carville.

I’d read Taffy Brodesser-Akner on anything, but she’s especially delicious on Joshua Cohen’s novel, “The Netanyahus,” in The Times.

Finally, Dave Chappelle joined Foo Fighters onstage at Madison Square Garden this past weekend, where they covered Radiohead’s “Creep.” Watch that here, and I’ll be back on Friday.