Valerie Gurdal makes a land-based paella with chicken, sausage, rabbit and ham. For five years, she and Chris Schlesinger have faced off in a friendly backyard competition.
Ryan T. Conaty for The New York Times
Friday, April 24, 2015
8 Weekend Recipes Cooked Inside and Out

The weekend's almost here: time to get ambitious about your cooking. We've hustled through the first days of spring, gotten out of the house to try this new restaurant or that one, released the hobgoblins created by a winter making stews over the stove, and now we're ready to spend Saturday and Sunday making something fun.

Consider the grill. A zillion years ago, we commissioned the brothers Lee, Matthew and Ted - adventurous souls, excellent cooks and wise missionaries of the delicious - to head into city parks to try their hands cooking over the grills found within them, heavy, cumbersome things known to bureaucrats as park grills. If you can make great food on a park grill, we surmised, you can make great food on any grill.

Here is their easy recipe for grilled flank steak from that endeavor. And a fine recipe for a hobo pack of new potatoes, red onion and orange to go along with it. Give those a try.

More ambitiously, you could set your sights on an early-season grilled paella. Cooking offers three variations: mine, which combines chicken, chorizo, shrimp and clams, and two from the grill doctors Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby, one that emphasizes seafood and another that leans more on the rustic flavors of rabbit and ham (above).

Perhaps you don't fancy a weekend cooking in the great outdoors. There is still enough of a morning nip in the air that using the oven is no chore, and baking is a fantastic balm for the soul after a week in the salt mines or data cubes.

Take a gander at Emily Weinstein's adaptation of a great Dorie Greenspan recipe for carrot cake. Watch Melissa Clark make an orange marmalade cake in this terrific video, and see if you don't want to cook right along with her. (Get good marmalade. That Brand X supermarket stuff won't do.) Or just pour some batter in a slow cooker, as in this ace Christina Tosi recipe for dinner-party cake, and kick back.

You can find other recipes to cook this weekend at Cooking. Make life easier on yourself and save the ones you like to your recipe box. Then, when you've cooked them, you can rate their success on a scale of one to five stars. (If you fill out this survey, you can leave notes on the recipes as well.) Build a healthy habit that will benefit us all!

If you run into problems along the way - with the recipes, the site or our apps for the iPad and iPhone - please reach out to us at cookingcare@nytimes.com. We'll try and get you sorted as quickly as we can.

And you can always get in touch with me directly. I'm on Twitter with the tabs: @samsifton. I'm on Instagram, using Amaro: samsifton. And I'm on Facebook posting links along with open-ended questions about food and fish. Have a great weekend. Enjoy the Kat Vinter song "Downtime" off her debut solo EP, out next week.

Paella of the land.
Ryan T. Conaty for The New York Times
About 1 1/2 hours, about 12 servings
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
15 minutes, 6 servings
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Paella of the sea.
Ryan T. Conaty for The New York Times
About 2 hours, 12 to 16 servings
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Melissa Clark makes butter-rich British marmalade cake topped with icing.
Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times
1 1/2 hours , 8 servings
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Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times
About 5 hours, 6 to 8 servings
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