The Best Chicken Teriyaki Recipe

Good morning. John T. Edge brought us this recipe for a Seattle-style chicken teriyaki, adapted from one by Sujan Shrestha, many years ago: salty-sweet and garlic-gingery, with a starch-thickened, glossy sauce that pairs beautifully with rice and broccoli. I make the dish with less sugar and more pineapple juice than John calls for and only marinate the chicken for a few hours before cooking. Cook’s choice.

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Chicken Teriyaki

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Sometimes I make it with steak tips and a lot more soy sauce, and serve the result with fries. That’s a regional teriyaki, too: a dish that nods at one served for years at the Rhumb Line bar in Greenport, N.Y., best consumed with cold beer and an Elmore Leonard novel. For that I like a lot of marination, at least 24 hours.

You can make salmon teriyaki (no need to marinate!). Cabbage steak teriyaki (same). And if you make Genevieve Ko’s recipe for teriyaki sauce, you can bring a shine to firm tofu, to pork chops, to seitan, to asparagus or whatever you like or happen to have on hand.

The idea, this weekend, is just to mess around with teriyaki and to celebrate how sweet and salt can multiply the power of ginger and garlic to the benefit of whatever you’re cooking. (Teriyaki shrimp would be incredible. I’d cook the shrimp in butter until they’re just going pink, then toss with the sauce and slide everything onto a warmed platter to serve with rice and steamed spinach.)

It’s decided, then? We’ll have teriyaki for at least one meal this weekend.

And as long as I’m being prescriptive, we’ll have extra-creamy scrambled eggs for breakfast the following day.

Another meal I’d like to make this weekend: a version of the Jerusalem grill dish Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook put in their “Israeli Soul” cookbook. It’s made with a lot of different parts of a chicken, but Michael told me once that the real secret to the dish is the warm spicing, and I’ve taken that to mean I can cook something similar with ground lamb and caramelized onions, then serve the result over his perfect five-minute hummus, perhaps with some baba ghanouj, warm pita and a salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, red onion and mint.

Also, maybe: pasta primavera with asparagus and peas? Strawberries with brown butter shortcake? A porchetta pork roast? There are thousands of recipes to choose from this weekend waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Go take a look and see what you find.

If you find yourself jammed up with your account please write for help: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (If you need a subscription, you can get one here.) Or you can write to me, if you want to lodge a complaint or deliver a compliment: hellosam@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I do read each one I get.

Now, it’s nothing to do with kumquats or backstraps of venison, but holy cow did Joseph Goldstein deliver a powerful accounting, in The New York Times, of how obsessive-compulsive disorder crippled a New York firefighter’s career.

I’ve enjoyed a number of series recently that aren’t binge-able, that required waiting for new episodes: “1923,” “The Pitt” and, most recently, “MobLand” on Paramount+. That show’s getting stranger and more dangerous every week.

My colleague Molly Young had a lovely meal with the cartoonist R. Crumb and his biographer, Dan Nadel. Her article about that is a delight. And so is Dwight Garner’s review, in The New York Times Book Review, of the biography itself. Dwight has a great line in there about Nadel’s work: “This machine kills boredom.”

Finally, it’s the birthday of Ella Fitzgerald, who died in 1996 at 79. Here she is singing “How High the Moon” in Berlin in 1960. Listen to that while you’re cooking, and I’ll see you on Sunday.