Good morning. Do you know kubaneh? It’s a Yemeni yeast bread that sits at the crossroads of soft Parker House roll and laminated croissant. Tejal Rao wrote about it this week for The New York Times Magazine, and, of course, there’s a recipe (above) that you should cook as soon as you can. A lot of recipes don’t really come together until the second, third or even fourth time you make them. (See, for example, popovers, omelets, mayonnaise.) Kubaneh is not one of them. It rewards imperfection, and is a project to enjoy rather than get nervous about, or dread.
Try it tonight. There’s no better way to knock out the Monday blues than to cook as if it’s still the weekend, and you at the center of it, without a care in the world.
Or, if that’s impossible, you’ve got a meeting to lead tomorrow that’s like 20 slides and a whole thicket of appendices, and you know there are going to be sticking points with Important Stakeholders and all you really want to do is, like, apply to become a park ranger and move wherever they tell you to move?
Here’s what to do: Make a sausage parm sandwich and get to bed early, then into work early tomorrow to prepare.
It’s simple. Cut up a small onion, and sweat it in rather more butter than you would ordinarily, for its healing properties. Now add some good canned tomatoes, crushing them with your hands as you add them to the pot, and a little salt. Brown an Italian sausage or two in a separate pan, and add these to the pot. Cut open a baguette or roll and spread it open like a book. Put some salad greens onto the bread, then top with sausage and a little sauce. Add sliced mozzarella and a little more sauce, and toast it all in the oven until it’s melty and fine. Eat, then store the remaining sauce in the fridge, so you can use it later on pasta, after the presentation, when all is blueberries and parades.
There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook tonight and in coming days on Cooking. Please save the ones you’re interested in to your recipe box, so you can find them when you need them. After you’ve cooked, you can award stars to the recipes, and you can leave notes on them as well, for yourself or for others. We all learn from those. As we do from the photographs of your cooking that you post to social media, where we monitor the hashtag #NYTCooking. Come check us out on Twitter and Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest.
Finally, if you find yourself at odds with a particular recipe or with the technology that sits at the back end of our site and apps, please reach out for help. Our care team is at cookingcare@nytimes.com. For issues of a more philosophical nature, you can always find me at foodeditor@nytimes.com.
And it’s sort of a bummer that museum websites are generally so lame, because I’d really like to show you Todd Webb’s images in The Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition of his work, “A City Seen: Todd Webb’s Postwar New York, 1945-1960.” You can see a few on the website of his archive, though, or travel to 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to see them in person, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Have a great week.
Gentl and Hyers for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Rebecca Bartoshesky.