RITZY CHEDDAR CHICKEN BREASTS
“They’re as good as they sound,” my foot! This just did not work. I mean, the chicken was cooked through in the projected baking time, so I guess that’s a win. We did not taste the tang of the sour cream or mustard, or the sharpness of the cheddar. In fact, we didn’t taste much of anything. I should have heeded the reviews… (Full disclosure: I used gluten-free crackers that were like multigrain saltines, tasty on their own but not as breading.)
Bummer!! Thanks for taking one for the team.
ONE PAN ROASTED FISH WITH CHERRY TOMATOES
Winner, winner, fish dinner! I cannot cook fish without a recipe (mom doesn’t like fish so I didn’t grow up eating it) and this is the first no-fail recipe I’ve found. I’ve made it with cod, halibut, or mahi. I’ve made it with shallots or diced onion. I usually use double the tomatoes so it counts as a vegetable, and I skip the lemon zest and herbs because I’m lazy.
I’m so glad you posted this. I had saved it but now have moved it into my “make this winter” category.
Oh, I’m excited about this one. Halibut and mahi are somehow ok with LLD, and this sounds delicious.
This looks similar to the white fish baked on cherry tomatoes from Small Victories that everyone liked when it was COTM on Chowhound, maybe different finishing touches.
Great memory! This one looks a bit more tomato-y (or I cooked down my tomatoes a bit too much in that one).
Yes, many international recipes are oddly lacking, which is surprising when their primary audience (local) had access to both the flavor profile and the ingredients.
On the other hand, their more recent (social media focused) easy-clicks have been all over high-octane international ingredients (harissa, gochujang, etc)
A lot of Eric Kim’s recipes that I’ve tried don’t work as well as promised (see prior COTM here lol)
My aunt was making two similar chicken recipes on repeat for a while — in case one of them can work for you (though finding good GF breading would be helpful).
I love butter beans! This sounds great.
I tried this one during the pandemic and loved it — also cannelini beans (I skipped the chickpeas), cooked like Italian milk-braised pork or chicken:
I wonder if the editor(s) for NYT Cooking kick things back to writers of recipes asking them to simplify because of a perception that their (local) audience might be put off when looking for ingredients, even if the ingredients should be relatively easy to track down in the NYC area. It shouldn’t be that way, but I feel like it is. That’s why the indie blogs with no editor to answer to can take those risks.
I actually meant the opposite – that they don’t need to kick down because most of the food is accessible here, and so are the ingredients quite easily. So I don’t understand it at all, vs for a newspaper situated in a place with less things of every provenance.
That’s why I wonder about editorial bias. Who is gatekeeping the audience from actually getting a correct recipe and why?
Hard to tell.
Here’s an old Bittman recipe for one of my favorite Chinatown dishes – big tray chicken. Very little dumbing down (other than skipping the noodles).
.
Made and reported here
.
And here’s the restaurant version
But they’re not really writing with the local NYC audience in mind, since the lion’s share of NYT subscribers (and presumably also Cooking subscribers, whether as part of an all-access subscription or as a standalone) are outside the NY metro area,
Bittman probably has enough clout that he could push back. A newbie not so much. 
I think there’s old vs new
The new audience for Cooking is very different, and so is the environment of what’s going to go viral on social media (or appeal to someone with a Cooking subscription in a place without the easy access of the local area, even though Amazon and other outlets have evened out some of that)
True, but a lot of the same audience are probably also reading Bon Appetit, Food and Wine, etc., where they would be exposed to those ingredients. It feels like a needlessly cautious approach to recipe writing in the 21st century at this point.
Perhaps. although reading the comments on NYT recipes, it’s not infrequently that I see someone say, “I’ve never heard of X, where would I get that/what can I substitute?”
Which would be a great reason for the NYT to update their practices to include possible substitutions (as those magazines often do already)!
