An Iranian Stew to Celebrate Ramadan

Good morning. It’s the new moon today and with it the start of Ramadan, one of Islam’s holiest months. We have loads of recipes for suhoor, iftar and, for planning purposes, the Eid al-Fitr holiday that will come at the end of March. To all those observing: Ramadan Mubarak.

Naz Deravian has a new recipe for an iftar meal: khoresh gheymeh (above), an Iranian stew of lamb and split peas topped with crispy onions. “Khoresh” is a Persian word for stews or braises; “gheymeh” refers to the size of the pieces of meat — small, almost minced. Spiced with turmeric, cinnamon and saffron, sweet with onion, rich with tomato paste and finished with either dried lime or a healthy pour of lime juice, it’s a dish I commend even to those who aren’t really sure what iftar is (it’s the meal eaten after a day of fasting). Serve over rice with a Shirazi salad.

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Khoresh Gheymeh (Meat and Split Pea Stew)

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I don’t observe Ramadan, so Saturday’s going to be similar to most Saturdays I’ve ridden through of late: a breakfast of a single, precious half-boiled egg doused in soy sauce, with a toasted English muffin slathered in cold butter and marmalade, followed by a long drive through distant neighborhoods looking for a perfect Italian sub. (I invariably end up at Defonte’s in Brooklyn for a Nicky Special or a Princess, depending on mood.)

For dinner? Spicy sesame noodles with chicken and peanuts, into which I generally stir some baby spinach for a flash of green. That’s an excellent meal.

Sundays are for waffles, for pancakes, for starting the day with a little feast that can extend toward noon with mugs of strong, milky black tea and a graze through the print edition of The New York Times.

I’ll take a nap for lunch and then get going in the afternoon with preparations for a proper Sunday supper with family: a simple salt-and-pepper roast chicken, with Madeira gravy, fluffy mashed potatoes and a bowl of frozen peas cooked through with sweet butter and just a little mint.

Unless, that is, family bags out on me — there’s a bowling tournament no one reminded the old man about; a date with friends, same.

If that’s the case, I’ll upshift into experimentation mode and keep playing with this recipe for steamed tofu with a garlicky black-bean sauce that I’ve been hacking out of Calvin Eng’s new cookbook, “Salt Sugar MSG.” It’s pretty cool. You steam slabs of silken tofu (silken tofu’s delicate, and my slabs generally turn out as chunks) and then serve them over rice, doused in a gravy of garlic and black-bean sauce mixed with a handful of seared ground beef or pork.

Eng makes his own black-bean sauce from scratch, but I’ve done well with store-bought Lee Kum Kee mixed with a little hoisin sauce, maple syrup and chicken stock. Make your rice, get the ground pork sizzling as soon as the tofu goes into the steam bath, add the sauce and stir to combine. You’ll have dinner on the table 10 minutes later. Don’t forget to scatter some sliced scallions over the top.

There are thousands more recipes to cook this weekend waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Go see what you find. You need a subscription to do that, of course. Subscriptions are what make this whole endeavor possible. If you haven’t already, would you consider subscribing today? Thanks.

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Now, it’s a considerable distance from anything to do with cakes or ale, but my old boss Dean Baquet put me onto Dan Chaon’s fourth novel, “Sleepwalk,” published in 2022. It’s lawless, funny, really, really dark.