Time to Get Cooking

Good morning. Welcome back. It’s been two weeks of people pushing off meetings and decisions, treading water in the corporate pool and the raging river of unemployment alike, nothing getting done although there’s so much to do. Today marks the end of all that. It’s go time for 2021. Time to get serious. Time to buckle down.

I hope that won’t diminish your cooking. Holiday ingredients still abound in many homes, and they can continue to offer joy even as time-eating responsibilities begin to ramp up and people start sweating again over objectives and key results, budgets or the search for work itself.

For instance, I usually get a few loaves of panettone every Christmas season — from the market, from faraway friends, in the old days from house guests. I consume the first one pretty quickly — panettone makes for an ace breakfast treat on Christmas Day, and on following ones — but invariably one loaf gets left aside until it goes beyond its prime.

Maybe that’s you, too? If so, you might take a look this week at Tejal Rao’s recipe for panettone bread pudding, which is her delicious hack of a recipe that the pastry chef Elisabeth Prueitt uses for brioche bread pudding at Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. I like it for dessert on a chilly evening, perhaps to follow this terrific yam and plantain curry with crispy shallots (above), or a wine-braised chicken with artichoke hearts.

I’d love to cook this spicy slow-roasted salmon with cucumbers and feta this week. And this risotto with peas and sausage as well. But I get it if that’s a little much in a week such as this one. You can follow Tejal in that case, too, doubling her recipe for eggs Kejriwal and calling it dinner and a fine one at that.

Miso-glazed eggplant’s a terrific meal to eat at the start of the week. So is this roasted butternut squash bread salad. Chile-oil noodles with cilantro? Root vegetable soup? Pressure cooker shrimp biryani? Oh, yes.

There are thousands and thousands more recipes like that waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go browse the site and apps, and see what you find. Then save the recipes you like. Rate the ones you’ve made. And you can leave notes on them, too, if you want to recall a particular hack or substitution. Keep those notes private, if you like, or share them publicly with your fellow subscribers.

(Yes, you need to be a subscriber. Subscriptions are what allows NYT Cooking to continue. If you are able to do so, I hope you will subscribe to NYT Cooking today.)

And please ask for help if you need it. Just like the ski patrol at a favorite mountain, we are out on the trails to help if you find yourself stuck in a recipe, or sideways with our technology. Just write us at [email protected]. Someone will get back to you.

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It has precious little to do with Swiss chard or the availability of lemongrass at your local supermarket, but this is exquisite: Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s literary revolution, in The Times.

Longreads turned me on to this essay in Jewish Currents by Alexandra Tanner, about following a bunch of Mormon mommy bloggers.

Finally, here’s the John Pizzarelli Trio, “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” played at Birdland in New York, in 2019. Here’s hoping that can happen again this year. I’ll be back on Wednesday.

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