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    Join NYT Cooking for an ‘Easy Weeknight Dinners’ Book Talk in N.Y.C.

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    Emily Weinstein, Melissa Clark and Eric Kim will discuss the new cookbook, recipe writing, their go-to meals and tips for simple yet delicious cooking in a special event with Taffy Brodesser-Akner on Oct. 7 at the Times Center.Join us in person at the Times Center in New York City to celebrate the publication of New York Times Cooking’s new book, “Easy Weeknight Dinners,” by Emily Weinstein, editor in chief of Cooking and the Food section, with recipes from Cooking’s extraordinary contributing writers. Inspired by one of The New York Times’s most popular newsletters, Emily’s “Five Weeknight Dishes,” this book offers 100 fast and flavorful meals that will satisfy whether you’re seeking a standout dinner for one, crowd pleasers for picky kids or something special for company. Just because you’re busy doesn’t mean that you can’t have something excellent to eat.As a guest of this exclusive event you’ll have an opportunity to hear directly from Emily, who will be joined onstage by Melissa Clark and Eric Kim, two Cooking columnists. They’ll discuss recipe writing, go-to meals and tips for easy excellence in the kitchen, in conversation with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a New York Times Magazine contributor and the author of “Long Island Compromise.”Come to ask questions, mingle and meet Emily, Melissa and Eric. Stay for a Cooking tasting to enjoy samples of the recipes, buy a copy of the book and get it signed. Click here to register.Doors open at 6 p.m.Event runs from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.Signing and reception until 10 p.m.This invitation is nontransferable, and admits two people. Please indicate on your registration the number of tickets you’re requesting. An ID is required for entrance. More

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      An Easy Vegetarian Dinner That Starts With Corn

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      Seared on a sheet pan with crisp pillows of tofu and green chiles, corn kernels are the center of this summery recipe.Corn on the cob may get all the attention, but I’m here to make the case for corn off the cob, which is superior in so many ways.First of all, it’s egalitarian, suitable for middle-schoolers in braces, seniors in dentures and really anyone who doesn’t carry floss around in their pocket. It’s also faster to prepare, because slicing the kernels off the cob generally takes less time than waiting for a giant pot of water to come to a boil. As a bonus, you don’t have to wash that big awkward pot in the sink afterward.Recipe: Sheet-Pan Tofu With Corn and ChilesThat said, it helps to have a good kernel-removal technique. My favorite is to lay the ears flat on the cutting board to slice off the kernels, rotating as you go. This is not only easy, but also surprisingly tidy, allowing the kernels to fall into a neat pile rather than catapulting them all over my kitchen.In terms of precious summertime fridge space, loose kernels take up less real estate than whole ears, leaving room for the many watermelons I seem to keep lugging home. Packed in a container, the kernels will keep for two or three days, after which, if there’s any left, I’ll stick them in the freezer to brighten my winter. Corn that I freeze myself seems to taste better than the frozen stuff I can buy, perhaps because it feels so virtuously thrifty. Or maybe it just satisfies my summer urge to preserve food as lazily as possible, without the hassle of canning, pickling or jam-making.Once you’ve got your kernels at the ready, corn off the cob is an excellent foundation for a weeknight meal.For this recipe, I go the sheet-pan route and roast the kernels at high heat, which turns them golden at the edges and a little chewy. Sweet corn goes well with bold, spicy flavors, especially chiles, both powder and fresh. Here, I season the corn with chili powder (a mix of ground chiles, black pepper and other spices), and balance it out with the tangier heat of sliced jalapeños and a poblano.Then, for protein, I’ve paired everything with cubed tofu, coated in cornstarch so it becomes browned and crispy on the exterior while staying soft and pillowy on the inside.It all makes for a colorful dish with a lively mix of textures — and no toothpicks required.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      Cristeta Comerford, White House Chef to 5 Presidents, Retires

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      Ms. Comerford, known as “Cheffie” and the first woman and person of color to serve as White House executive chef, reflects on three decades of feeding first families.Growing up in the Philippines, Cristeta Comerford helped her mother, a seamstress, cook for a household of more than a dozen. They were simple meals: rice, a vegetable and fish or chicken, sometimes with extra potatoes to stretch the meal.She never considered that nourishing people, and doing a lot with a little, could be a job. But her father did.“He was like, ‘Cris! You should go to Cordon Bleu and be a chef,” Ms. Comerford, who goes by Cris or “Cheffie,” said in an interview on Thursday. She never did go to culinary school, but she became the first woman and person of color to serve as White House executive chef.Ms. Comerford, 61, retired last week, having cooked for five presidents and their families, charted out more than 50 state dinners, and overseen a renovation of the White House kitchen that was built more than a century ago. But she has not forgotten what first stirred her about cooking.“You see the public life, but at the end of the day the people that we serve are just people like us who want nourishment and good food,” Ms. Comerford said.Jill Biden, the first lady, praised the chef’s commitment to the first family in a statement announcing her retirement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rosa Ross, Late-Blooming Author of Asian Cookbooks, Dies at 86

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      She was, she said, unable to cook a basic meal into her mid-20s. But she went on to a successful career as restaurateur and an authority on Asian cuisine.Rosa Ross, a Hong Kong-born chef who, despite lacking even basic kitchen knowledge into her 20s, became a noted cookbook author, Chinese cooking instructor and restaurateur on the North Fork of Long Island, died on June 28 at her home in East Marion, N.Y. She was 86.The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, her daughter Sarah Ross said.Drawing from a swirl of culinary influences from her youth — Chinese, English, Indian, Malaysian — Ms. Ross began her rise in the food world in the early 1980s by traveling to homes around New York City to provide Chinese cooking lessons with a business she called Wok on Wheels.She published the first of her four cookbooks, “365 Ways to Cook Chinese,” in 1994. Ten years later, after moving to Greenport, N.Y., she veered from classic Chinese cooking by opening the restaurant Scrimshaw there.Scrimshaw, which closed in 2016, was an early farm-to-table American restaurant that blended in elements of the Asian cuisine of her youth, including heritage-pork dumplings and duck-confit spring rolls that became the stuff of local legend.The restaurant also showcased Italian fare, which she first learned to make while living in Milan and honed under the tutelage of her friend Marcella Hazan, the author of “The Classic Italian Cook Book” (1973).Diners at Scrimshaw, Ms. Ross’s restaurant in Greenport, N.Y., in 2004, the year it opened. Scrimshaw showcased Italian and American cooking, but it was also noted for its heritage-pork dumplings and duck-confit spring rolls.Deirdre Brennan for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      David Liederman, Who Found Sweet Success With David’s Cookies, Dies at 75

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      His innovative version of the chocolate chip cookie, studded with irregular pieces of dark Swiss chocolate, led to a chain of more than 100 stores worldwide.David Liederman, whose confections redefined the chocolate chip cookie and whose chain, David’s Cookies, eventually grew to more than 100 stores nationwide, died on Thursday in Mount Kisco, N.Y., near his home in Katonah. He was 75.His wife, Susan Liederman, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a heart attack. He was also being treated for myelofibrosis, a type of blood cancer.Mr. Liederman’s innovative version of the chocolate chip cookie will keep his name alive.The cookie’s unique feature was that it was not made with standard Toll House chocolate chips but was studded with irregular pieces of dark Swiss Lindt chocolate. He chopped the chocolate by hand, the way Ruth Graves Wakefield did when she created the Toll House cookie in 1938 in Whitman, Mass., before Nestlé took over and began manufacturing its little chocolate drops. Mr. Liederman called his cookies chocolate chunk, a term that has become widely understood and used in the world of baking and confections.But long before his revisionist cookie came on the scene, creating his reputation and cranking up his income, his career in food, as a chef, was starting to simmer like a good pot-au-feu.He was 19, still an undergraduate, when he went to France. Intrigued by Michelin three-star restaurants, of which there were but a handful at the time, he decided to eat at Troisgros in Roanne, near Lyon, because it seemed to be the cheapest. The meal set him back $19 (the equivalent of about $172 today); the food was an epiphany.He persuaded the Troisgros brothers to let him hang out in the restaurant’s kitchen and work for the next few summers, despite his lack of culinary training. While he was studying for a degree at Brooklyn Law School and clerking for Judge Maxine Duberstein of the New York State Supreme Court, he began taking classes at night in the culinary program at New York Technical College (now the New York City College of Technology) in Downtown Brooklyn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a Death Doula Throws a Dinner Party

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      At the Baroque guesthouse she runs in Portugal, Rebecca Illing hosted old friends for a meal suffused with nostalgia.As a child, Rebecca Illing would spend vacations with her parents and brother, Alex, at Paço da Glória, a gothic mansion turned guesthouse in Portugal’s lush Minho region. A 40-minute drive north of Porto, then the family’s hometown, the property is surrounded by dense cork oak woodland, and Illing loved getting lost on its grounds and exploring its winding corridors. Parts of the house date to the 14th century, and it grew haphazardly from there: An imposing dark gray stone facade topped with medieval-style merlons was added in the 1700s; later, the English peer Lord Peter Pitt Millward reimagined the home in the style of a Baroque palace. In the 1970s, it became a guesthouse under the stewardship of another Briton, Colin Clark, the filmmaker and author of the 2020 memoir “My Week with Marilyn.”For the past 21 years, the 10-acre estate — with its bright green lawns and grand granite swimming pool — has been owned by Illing’s family. (Her mother, who met Illing’s father in Porto, had always dreamed of buying the place.) And since 2022, following renovations of the nine guest rooms and the installation of a yoga deck and indoor pool, the property has been run exclusively by Illing herself as a guesthouse of a different sort: one that is, to use her phrase, “grief literate.”A view of the garden beyond the archway that connects the home and its adjacent chapel.Matilde ViegasThe group, including Illing (center), gathered on the lawn for drinks.Matilde ViegasThe walls of the main hall are lined with busts of celebrated Frenchmen, statues reportedly put in place by the British aristocrat Lord Peter Pitt Millward, who bought the property at auction in 1932.Matilde ViegasWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Festive Juneteenth Dishes

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      Make one, or make them all. Just make them yours.On Kiva Williams’s Juneteenth table, pops of red — barbecue ribs and watermelon, a symbol of freedom — share the table with hot dogs, burgers, potato salad and baked beans. Sometimes, foods from her past, like fried fish and spaghetti, and coleslaw, “my favorite meal from back home” in Tennessee, also make an appearance.For Ms. Williams, who runs the Fun Foodie Mama blog, the celebration is a relatively small one, and recent. Ms. Williams, 44, didn’t grow up celebrating Juneteenth — she’d learned about the holiday from her parents, but didn’t celebrate.But, “as I grew older and had a family of my own, I wanted to be intentional with my kids on celebrating,” she said, adding that she hopes to pass down the celebration, its recipes and cooking traditions to her children. She and her family attend local festivals, spend time learning about the holiday and, of course, gather around a meal.Red foods are customary for Juneteenth, the annual commemoration of the freeing of the last enslaved Africans in Galveston, Texas, two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The scarlet hue symbolizes ingenuity and resilience while in bondage. It’s been three years since Juneteenth became a national holiday, and people are carving out their own traditions.The daughter of Congolese parents who grew up in Paris, Karen Tshimanga, 37, of Harlem, started celebrating Juneteenth in 2020, after the George Floyd protests.She honors the holiday in a number of ways: eating, dancing, laughing, volunteering. And when it comes to food, she celebrates with friends at a potluck, the table set with food from different parts of the world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      French-American Friendship in Four Courses

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      Under Emmanuel Macron, “culinary diplomacy” is back on the menu, with a lavish dinner fortifying an old alliance at a tense historical moment.Beneath the crystal chandeliers of the gilded reception hall of the Élysée Palace, opened in 1889 with a party for 8,000 people, President Emmanuel Macron of France hosted President Biden on Saturday night at a state dinner intended to celebrate a very old alliance and demonstrate that the bond is greater than its intermittent frictions.Mr. Biden, addressing the French leader as “Emmanuel,” rose from a long table adorned with a bouquet of pink peonies and roses to say that “France was our first ally, and that is not insignificant.” He cited a book titled “The Pocket Guide to France” that he said was distributed to the American forces who, eight decades ago, fought their way up the Normandy bluffs through a hail of Nazi gunfire to wrest Europe from tyranny.“No bragging,” Mr. Biden quoted the guide as saying, “the French don’t like that!” The book urged U.S. solders to be generous — “it won’t hurt you” — and said the French “happen to speak democracy in a different language, but we are all in the same boat.”That “same boat” of 1944 has repeatedly been invoked during Mr. Biden’s five-day visit to France as still existing today in the form of joint French and U.S. support for Ukraine in a battle against Russia defined as pivotal for the defense of European liberty. “We stand together when the going gets tough,” Mr. Biden said.The going was scarcely that at a sumptuous dinner served at tables set between the fluted columns of a room conceived a century after the French Revolution to project the glory of the Republic.Beneath golden caryatids and a painted ceiling medallion reading “The Republic safeguarding peace,” battalions of liveried waiters in white bow ties, bearing silver trays, served with impeccable precision a four-course meal accompanied by champagne and a 2006 Château Margaux that had taken 18 years to achieve perfection.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Recipe for Perfect Broiled Shrimp Every Time

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      Cooking the tiny crustaceans on a sheet pan can be tricky. This vibrant dish, full of golden-edged zucchini, from Melissa Clark changes that.Some sheet-pan meals are so simple you could almost cook them in your sleep. Throw some chicken legs and sturdy root vegetables on a pan, sprinkle with salt and maybe herbs or spices, then drizzle with oil and stick it all in a hot oven. About 40 minutes later, the dark meat is reliably juicy, the vegetables golden and bathed in rendered chicken fat, and both take about the same amount of time. It’s an adaptable meal that would be hard to get wrong.Recipe: Roasted Zucchini and Shrimp With Za’atar YogurtOthers take more finesse. This combination of shrimp and zucchini is one of them.I could just picture it, a pan full of golden-edged, green-skinned zucchini dotted with crescents of tender, coral-hued shrimp and seasoned liberally with za’atar and lemon zest. A garlicky, creamy yogurt sauce spiked with even more za’atar would add a tangy, zippy flourish right at the end.But first, I had to work out the timing of shellfish versus the vegetables.The sticking point is that, unlike forgiving chicken legs and roots, which have a relatively wide window of doneness, shrimp and zucchini can be finicky. Leave shrimp in the oven for even a minute too long, and they will go from succulent and plump to rubber ball bouncy. Zucchini, on the other hand, with its high moisture content, needs plenty of roasting time for the juices to condense, then caramelize. How to get them to cook on the same sheet pan in the easiest possible way?In my first round of testing, I started with the zucchini in the oven, letting it roast until sufficiently browned, which takes about 35 minutes. Then, I added the shrimp for another couple of minutes. This worked pretty well, but not consistently enough. Sometimes the shrimp at the edges of the pan had curled and toughened by the time the ones in the middle cooked through.Switching to the broiler after adding the shrimp made all the difference. The heat from above seared them quickly and evenly until they were all perfectly cooked, and it also amped up the golden color of the zucchini, making it richer and more intense. It was well worth the extra step.Although this recipe does involve more moves than, say, sleepwalk chicken and vegetables, it’s still blissfully easy. And those few moments of paying attention are amply rewarded with a delightful meal to satisfy your sheet-pan dinner dreams.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More