What to Cook This Weekend

Good morning. It was 50 years ago next month that gay New Yorkers spontaneously rose up to protest police raids on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, catalyzing the gay liberation movement. Their actions were among the first instances of major resistance to the maltreatment and criminalization of gay people in America, and Pride Month is still one of their great legacies — four weeks of celebration of and in and for the L.B.G.T.Q. community here and around the globe.

We baked a rainbow cake (above), a pride flag in the form of dessert. The recipe calls for 9 sticks of butter and 8 eggs and is very beautiful in its ombre cloak. Here’s hoping lots and lots of people will make it and post photographs on social media and enjoy their labor in support of others, in support of people we love.

What else to make this weekend? I’ve been messing around a lot recently with a plancha, a sheet of ¼-inch steel that sits over about half of the surface of my gas grill. It’s a very good cooking surface for smash burgers and pork and peaches and Jerusalem grill. It’s terrific for quesadillas and fried eggs. But I really love it for fish, and I think as the weather warms it’d come very much in handy when making this classic Melissa Clark recipe for pan-seared hake and asparagus with aioli. If you don’t have a plancha but still want to cook outside on a grill, make the dish in a cast-iron pan set on the grates.

I could go for some pimento cheese (maybe to slather on my smash burger?). Also, for Melissa’s great adaptation of Haitian pork griot. You could make this chana dal in the New Delhi style. Or, perhaps, this astonishingly pretty platter of caramelized beets with orange-saffron yogurt, which I watched Yotam Ottolenghi make one afternoon in a sun-dappled kitchen in South London before he came to The Times, when I was just a reporter covering him for a story.

Pasta with mint and Parmesan? A big, buttery pan pizza? How about an Atlantic Beach pie? All good fun to make on a weekend and delicious to eat to boot. But if you’ve been fasting days for the past month because of Ramadan, I’m sure you don’t want to hear it. Eid al-Fitr comes on Monday night, the festival of breaking the fast, and runs through Tuesday. We’ve got some nice recipes for that.

Thousands more recipes to cook this weekend and in the weeks to come are on NYT Cooking. If you don’t yet have a subscription that allows you to access them, I’m sorry. Will you consider taking one out today? The transaction helps us both.

Further inspiration – my old pal Mark Bittman calls it “dinspiration” – can be found in the showrooms of our off-platform content factories, on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Here’s a cool new video about fish tacos. Tag us when you make the rainbow cake.

Reach out directly if you’re in trouble with a recipe or having issues with our site and apps. We’re at: [email protected], standing by like guardian protectors popped from the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.

Now, it’s a long-haul flight from weekend scones, but Ian Brown wrote a very funny story for The Globe and Mail of Toronto, about trying to grow marijuana, and I think you ought to read it.

Have you had enough of Bret Easton Ellis getting pounded on by the critics? James Wolcott took his turn for the London Review of Books and got off some good lines. I’ll let you find them.

Yes, you should watch “I Am Easy to Find,” the short film by Mike Mills that accompanies The National’s new album.

D’oh! I called Sancerre a grape in Wednesday’s newsletter. Of course it’s a region of the Loire Valley, where the grapes used to make white wine are sauvignon blanc.

Finally, A.O. Scott on “Rocketman” in The Times. Here he is on Taron Egerton, who plays Elton John: “Egerton, with what can only be called flamboyant understatement — and also, I suppose, understated flamboyance — in effect plays both the Lady Gaga and the Bradley Cooper parts in a fresh iteration of ‘A Star in Born.’” A.O. Scott is so, so good. See you on Sunday.