Cooking
This wonderfully doable recipe from Vivian Chan-Tam is a fun bit of kitchen craft time.
I’m a pretty fidgety person — apologies to everyone seated in front of me on planes whom I’ve accidentally bumped — so for me, a cooking project is just as much about the finished dish as it is all the handiwork that goes into it. I love folding dumplings, caramelizing onions, wrapping enchiladas, massaging kimchi, rolling meatballs. This “keep my hands busy” philosophy is the same reason I got into knitting. But you can’t eat a sweater, even if it’s knit in brioche stitch.
This weekend, my kitchen arts and crafts project will be these hand-pulled noodles, a wonderfully doable recipe from Vivian Chan-Tam. Before you ask, yes, there’s a video!
The dough comes together from just three ingredients — bread flour, water and salt — plus some important resting intervals so that your noodles are easy to pull and get that perfect boingy consistency. And while your dough rests, you can think about all the delicious ways to eat your noodles. Slicked with chile crisp? Swimming in soup? I’ll be piling mine on top of spicy big tray chicken, another excellent cooking project.
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Hand-Pulled Noodles
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My farmers’ market has these glorious stalks of brussels sprouts, and while I could easily buy them loose, I want to sling one of those knobby stalks over my shoulder and bring it home for Melissa Clark’s five-star sheet-pan coriander chicken with caramelized brussels sprouts. I know I’m essentially adding extra prep time, but I don’t mind, and the rest of the recipe is super streamlined.
Also showing off at the market: leeks, stacked and bundled in taut piles of shiny white and pale green. Washing and slicing them is a bit of a chore, sure, but less so with a Studio Ghibli playlist going in the background and Yasmin Fahr’s miso mushroom and leek pasta as the endpoint.
For someone so fidgety, I’m extremely sluggish in the morning, so any breakfast recipes I want to make always end up bookmarked for dinner instead. That’s not a problem with Dan Pelosi’s new sausage and peppers frittata, which would be just as lovely as a Sunday breakfast as it would a Sunday dinner. Nestle that next to a pile of Ali Slagle’s sautéed kale with hot honey.
Lastly: I make banana bread to use up all those brown bananas, yes, but also because I find mashing said bananas into a sweet, smooth goo to be incredibly satisfying. So next up on my to-bake list is this peanut butter-banana bread with chocolate chips, a new recipe from the baking wizard Samantha Seneviratne. This recipe kindly saves me the trouble of spreading peanut butter on my banana bread slice by mixing the peanut butter right into the batter; the chocolate chips are there because, well, they’re chocolate chips. A perfect bake for puttering around your kitchen on a quiet morning.