Food Blog: Your New Meatball Sub

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Your New Meatball Sub

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Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Your New Meatball Sub

Sam Sifton

Good morning. There are some nights when all I want to eat for dinner is super-crisp chicken wings with ranch dressing, or hot dogs loaded with chopped pickles and streaked with crema and hot sauce. They’re usually Wednesday nights when I want a break from cooking, but don’t want to deal with the invariable disappointment of delivery food.

And now I’ve got a new meal to add to the Wednesday ledger: meatball subs (above) in all their cheesy, crispy, saucy magnificence. The recipe employs a neat trick where you scrape out the hero rolls to make bread crumbs for the meatball mix, leaving behind bread canoes for serving the sandwiches. Nice! (Alternate meatball situation: these chicken Parm ones Kay Chun developed.)

Not that I always cook off the sports-bar menu on Wednesday nights. I might make sweet potatoes with tahini butter and call it a night, or roasted mushrooms covered in a Memphis dry rub. I might make pork chops in cherry-pepper sauce, serve them with spaghetti dressed with only butter and Parmesan.

Suvir Saran gave us a marvelous recipe for palak ki tiki, spinach and potato patties that can be used for a tremendous vegetarian burgers, great with tamarind chutney and cucumber-flecked yogurt. That would be a fine Wednesday night meal.

So would spaghetti al limone with shrimp. So would glazed tofu with chile and star anise. And so would this amazing vinegar chicken with crisp roasted mushrooms.

There are thousands more recipes that you could cook tonight or some day soon waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. (Peach cobbler!) Go take a look and see what appeals. You can save the recipes you want to make. And rate the ones you’ve made. You can also leave notes on them, if you discover something about a recipe that you want to remember or share with your fellow subscribers.

Yes, subscribers. By subscribing, you support the work of the dozens of people who work to make the site and apps possible. You allow that work to continue. I hope if you haven’t already, that you will subscribe to New York Times Cooking today.

You can reach out to us directly if something goes sideways along the way, either with your cooking or our technology. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (I’m at foodeditor@nytimes.com if you’d like to send an apple or deliver a worm. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it’s nothing to do with duck fat or the price of lobster, but you should read Lauren Collins’s New Yorker profile of the French actor Omar Sy, the star of “Lupin” on Netflix.

Here’s a cool trip in the wayback machine to the post-punk music scene in New York in the 1980s, by Rob Tannenbaum in The Times.

Take a look at Michael O. Snyder and his Mountain Traditions Project, in The Bitter Southerner.

Finally, enough of my recommendations! Here are 10 of St. Vincent’s favorite things to watch, read and hear, brought to The Times by Olivia Horn. No recipes, but that’s my game. I’ll be back on Friday.