Keeping the memory of La Caridad 78 alive, and new recipes from Ali Slagle and Eric Kim.
By Sam Sifton
What to Cook This Weekend
By Sam Sifton
Good morning. It hurts me that I’ll never again take the subway to 79th Street in Manhattan, then amble south to eat a huge meal at La Caridad 78: egg foo young with roast pork; pan-fried pork chops with black bean sauce; yellow rice and black beans; a platter of sweet roasted plantains; an ice-cold Coke. The restaurant, which served Chino Latino cooking to the Upper West Side for more than 50 years, closed during the pandemic.
But I can keep its memory alive at home by combining favorite flavors of the Chinese diaspora with those of Cuba’s. It’s a perfect weekend cooking project for the middle of October: ropa vieja (above), for instance, alongside a platter of fried rice, with maduros, black beans and pressed and toasted French bread with butter.
Or sweet and sour pork, with arroz congrí? That could be great. I’ll serve a salad, either way: iceberg, tomatoes, onion and a sliced avocado, dressed with olive oil and red wine vinegar. And then have arroz con leche for dessert. Yes, there’ll be leftovers. When it came to groaning tables, La Caridad had virtually no peer.
That’s one idea for the weekend, anyway. You might prefer Ali Slagle’s new recipe for crispy coconut tempeh, a delicious vegan version of coconut shrimp that serves as an excellent introduction to the pleasures of cooking with tempeh. That would be ideal before a main course of cold noodle salad with spicy peanut sauce, I think.
Or you could grill jalapeño pork chops, to serve with cilantro rice. You could make fried chicken biscuits with hot honey butter. Or you might assemble this 30-minute mole that will not compare to an abuelita’s but is still pretty fantastic with its smart combination of peanut butter and tahini. I like that sauce with pan-fried chicken thighs. But you might try it with a collection of vegetables cut into equal size and roasted in a hot oven until they’re both crisp and soft. Superb.
And if you find yourself this weekend cooking for a smaller crowd than normal, or for just the same old one or two? Give Eric Kim’s new recipe for shrimp stew a try, “a sort of cousin of bouillabaisse, cioppino and maeuntang,” he wrote for The Times this week, “with a spicy, aromatic broth that’s tinged red with gochugaru, a Korean red-pepper powder.” Fantastic!
Thousands and thousands more recipes are lined up in digital stacks for you at New York Times Cooking. Go browse among them and see what piques your fancy. Save the recipes you like and rate the ones you’ve made. You can leave notes on them, too, if you’d like to remember a hack or substitution, or to share an observation with your fellow subscribers. (Yes, subscriptions are required, same as they are when you want to watch “The Good Fight” on Paramount+. I hope, if you haven’t already, that you will subscribe today.)
We will stand watch in the meantime just like the ski patrol at Whakapapa in New Zealand, ready to help if you run into trouble in the kitchen or on our site and apps. Just write to us at [email protected], and someone will get back to you. (You can also write to me: [email protected]. I read every letter sent.)
Now, it’s not so much about cooking as being cooked for, but see what you think of my colleagues’ amazing list of the 50 restaurants in the United States that we’re most excited by right now. Where are you going to go first?
Take a moment, too, to read our obituary for Anne Saxelby, who died on Saturday at age 40. She was a pre-eminent champion of American cheeses.
Shots fired: Los Angeles Magazine’s Heather Platt takes a look at eight Los Angeles pizzerias “that beat anything in Brooklyn.”
Finally, here’s Matthew Sweet, “Girlfriend.” Enjoy that, and I’ll see you on Sunday.
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