Perfect Grilled Chicken Breasts – The New York Times

Hello. When there are blue snapper fish running in the nearby bays, I like to catch a few and divide them into pieces and fillets – the pieces for a free-range ceviche with mango, jalapeño, red onion and tons of lime, and the fillets to slather with mayonnaise and mustard and roast until perfection, just like my grandparents did, just like my parents did and hopefully just like my children, over the generations. Mustard and mayonnaise are a phenomenal combination.

There haven’t been many bluefish this season, though. So this weekend, I’m taking the compound—Dijonnaise, in menu and recipe parlance—to the poultry section of the grocery store, and making Ali Slagle’s new recipe for Dijon Grilled Chicken Breasts (above).

It’s so good. The wrapped meat is insulated from the heat of the grill and tenderized by the acidity of the mustard. It takes on a tangy crust, with just a hint of smokiness, that responds well to a squeeze of lemon juice and an extra dollop of Dijonnaise. You can serve the breasts on a Cesar salad or – even if it is early – alongside a few ears of grilled corn.

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Dijon Grilled Chicken Breasts

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Even better, perhaps: take the cooked, rested chicken and slide it into a sandwich on toasted potato buns, with a dusting of Dijon mustard, a few sliced ​​pickles and a handful of shredded lettuce. It’s a taste of summer you won’t soon forget.

Other things I’d like to cook this weekend include these Fresh spring rollswith vermicelli noodles, shrimp, sliced ​​cucumber and carrot, lots and lots of herbs. Dragged through sauce Or peanut sauce (both in my case), they make an excellent argument in favor of a meal to prepare yourself, not very spicy and very rewarding.

Also: lychee cakea joy of Chinese Jamaican bakery life, in which layers of sponge cake are filled with lychee cream and topped with lychee frosting. It’s a fancy dessert after another Chinese-Caribbean gem, Trini-Chinese chickento serve with rice and fried plantains.

And if that blue fish ceviche continues to haunt me, as I know it will, I will quench my cravings with sushi-grade tuna and make this poke bowl instead.

There will be scrambled eggs for breakfast, with baked bacon, Crepes And fruit salad. There will be radish sandwiches for lunch, with watermelon lemonade.

There will be a lot of cooking, because that’s what weekends are for.

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It has nothing to do with strawberries or smoked eel, but I found myself immersed in the fifth season of the edgy, multilingual French spy series “The Bureau,” streaming on Amazon Prime. Malotru is in great shape.

I don’t know how I missed William Finnegan’s profile of legendary surfer Jock Sutherland in the New Yorker. I’ll make it up to you now.

Also recent: Walt Hunter’s poem, “Translation Without Angels,” in The New York Review of Books.

Finally, for the New York Times, Jon Pareles and Lindsay Zoladz have chosen “The 40 Best Songs of 2024 (So Far),” a playlist for your weekend and a veritable treasure trove of deliciousness. Listen to this while you cook. And I’ll see you Sunday.