Good morning. I’m going hard on the fats and proteins this weekend. That’s not only because it’s still winter, but also because, for many, next week brings the start of Ramadan and its daily fasts that start at dawn and end with iftar, the sunset meal to break the fast.
We have loads of recipes for Ramadan, including a marvelous roast chicken with couscous, dates and buttered almonds (above), a recipe that Julia Moskin adapted from the food writer Yvonne Maffei. It’s a winning combination. (I’m partial, as well, to Yotam Ottolenghi’s spiced maqluba with tomatoes and tahini sauce, and to Ifrah F. Ahmed’s Somali-style fava bean stew.) Ramadan Mubarak, one and all.
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Yvonne Maffei’s Roast Chicken With Couscous, Dates and Buttered Almonds
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More poultry? The farm where I get my Thanksgiving turkey every year also sells ducks, some of them cooked, rotisserie-style, in the shop at the front of their fields. I shred the meat from the carcass, crisp the skin in a skillet and wrap a bit of each in warm flour tortillas with hoisin sauce and sliced scallions for a dopey version of Peking duck that’s just as enjoyable as anything you’d get at Decoy or Hutong in Manhattan.
Mark Bittman’s recipe for an easy roast duck can give you similar results this weekend, or you can go whole hog (bird) with Kay Chun’s recipe for Peking duck with honey and five-spice glaze instead. I urge you to do so because most folks don’t eat duck often. (Americans consume just .34 pounds of duck each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.) And they ought to. Duck’s delicious.
This would be a good weekend, as well, to make Boston baked beans according to the chef Jasper White’s instruction, or following the chef Steve Johnson’s lead or by attending the guidance of James Beard. To go with, try this sneakily savory Boston brown bread made with doenjang, ideally steam-baked in a can.
And how about a Dutch baby for breakfast tomorrow, with bacon on the side and slices of apple cooked in the bacon fat, everything drizzled with maple syrup or served with a compote of strawberry jam and butter? How about a fried eggplant sandwich for lunch, in the style of Frankies Spuntino in Brooklyn? How about a poppy seed tea cake for afterward, in advance of a nap?
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Now, it’s nothing to do with tofu skins or dicing onions, but you should absolutely read Susan Dominus’s profile of Kate Winslet in The New York Times Magazine, with beautiful photography from Jack Davison.
Also in The Times, our Dwight Garner put me on to the debut novelist Rita Bullwinkel, whose book “Headshot,” he says, “is so enveloping to read that you feel, at times, that you are writing it in your own mind.”
Here’s Ted Conover, in Outside magazine, with the account of a mother with no backcountry experience taking her sister and young son to live off the grid on a mountain during a Colorado winter.
Finally, Jon Pareles, in The Playlist, alerted me to an excellent new track from the Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar, “Funeral for Justice.” Play that loud and I’ll see you on Sunday.
