Cooking
It’s the sort of meal you ought to make after a day of airline snacks or conference-room repasts, and definitely on Friday nights.
Good morning. I’m still smarting over the two really expensive sandwiches I bought the other day at a gourmet shop in the next town over: one of them an ostensibly Italian number on white-bread focaccia, fridge-cold and tasteless; the other a “spicy” fried chicken cutlet on soggy pretzel bread with kimchi. That one was bathwater-warm and tasteless.
Both were a reminder that the eating life isn’t always a run of wins. There are cruel defeats along the way, and the best thing to do when you experience them is to make absolutely sure that the meal that follows the loss is delicious.
To wit, try zha jiang mian, a classic Beijing-style dish of noodles with fried bean sauce that is porky and rich, salty-sweet and satisfying. You don’t need to have had a terrible meal in the hours before making it to experience its excellence, but it is a revelation if you have. It’s the sort of meal you ought to make after a day of airline snacks or conference-room repasts, and definitely on Friday nights. It’s perfect weekend fare even if you’ve been lucky enough to eat well all week. When it comes to these two days that some of us have off from work, we should be looking for five-star delectable every time.
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Zha Jiang Mian
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Other recipes in that vein: the tuna melt from Golden Diner in New York City; the buttermilk fried chicken I learned to make years ago in Rehoboth Beach, Del.; and the fish chowder that Julia Moskin picked up in the kitchen of Eventide, in Portland, Maine.
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