Future
Orange Beef Will Cure What Ails You
It’s takeout-style Chinese American cooking brought into your home kitchen, where you can get as creative as you’d like.
Sam Sifton’s orange beef.Credit…Rikki Snyder for The New York Times
Good morning. The way things usually work for me this time of year: Weekdays are beautiful, crisp and clear. Guides I know text me at work with shots of beautiful fish caught by their grateful clients.
Then Saturday arrives, and with it a honking east wind against what seems to be an always falling tide: steep chop that ought to delight the fish I’m chasing in my little, storm-tossed boat, but doesn’t because the fish aren’t there. They’re not anywhere. Every weekend. If I ever write a memoir about fishing, I’ll call it “You’d Have Thought.”
Cooking delicious food afterward helps. Cooking it beforehand, similarly. Delicious food keeps the spirit up when all the spirit wants to do is burn a pile of fly rods and take up a more reliably satisfying weekend activity than using them. Watching planes land at the airport, say, or sock repair.
For dinner this evening, then: orange beef (above), a dish I learned from the chef Dale Talde. It’s takeout-style Chinese American cooking brought into the home kitchen, where you can get fancy and use rib-eye steak instead of top sirloin or round. Attend to the sauce carefully, so that the citrus really pops. With steamed broccoli and a mound of white rice, the dish acts as a powerful antidepressant, which is great because in this weather I need one.
(Paging all Chicago White Sox fans. Orange beef is for you!)
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