Cookbook Survivor: New York Times Cooking App, Chicken Schwarma
Sunday's Child Is Bonny and Blithe
End of classes this last week. Even when I was a brand-new professor and still today, the end of the spring semester just leaves me ragged. All the year’s unfinished business tumbles across the finish line with us. So nothing elaborate for a meal this weekend. I made shrimp scampi with angel’s hair pasta yesterday (with ramps in place of the garlic). Today I decided to flick open the New York Times Cooking app, because it’s a pretty good place to search out a good, simple recipe idea that uses whatever I have available.
I’m not really wild about the way the Times is monetizing parts of itself, not the least because each separate part (Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, The Athletic) costs a pretty penny in its own right and yet do not interoperate with the main NYT app at all well. Cooking is also prone at odd times to decide that my phone is “offline” even though I’ve got a good connection (or I’m on wifi) and deny me particular recipes—I can look, but it will suddenly decide that the one recipe I want is to be kept from me. Each of them is also taking advantage of a pretty deep library and maybe not always doing as much new content as they might. Cooking can fool you a bit if you don’t read the fine print—a pretty substantial number of its recipes are just reprints from popular cookbooks. Authorized at least, so presumably at least a bit of money is going to the creators.
That said, of the separate apps, it’s easily the best and most useful. In the last few weeks, I’ve made a Vietnamese baby back pork rib recipe that was just terrific, honestly one of the best things I’ve eaten this entire year, and a crispy smashed chicken breast with gin and sage that lived up to its superlatives. Today I’m going to try a sheet-pan chicken schwarma recipe by Sam Sifton. I should make pita bread to go with it, but I’m not in the mood to mess with dough, so I’m going to make some wild rice and a salad.
Image credit: "Schwarma for lunch in Zamalek!" by kaymoshusband is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.