Good morning. Welcome back. It was nice there for a while, everything operating at about 60 percent capacity, like an easy drive through Berlin to Paris Bar for Champagne and fries, everyone smiling, everyone in sweaters, everyone chill. Now it’s a new year, top of the quarter, first day back and everyone’s goal-setting, performance-assessing, level-setting, freaking out. We’re so behind, we’ll never catch up!
Meanwhile: How those resolutions going?
You’ve just got to breathe. You’ve just got to get through whatever it is this morning has brought you and remember that there are people who love you and people you love, and if you can get to the market on the way home you can cook for them and make them feel better and in doing so feel better yourself. (Alexa, play this affirmation on repeat.) That’s it, 2020 in a nutshell, a life plan that works: Just cook.
Tonight, for instance, you could make braised tofu in caramel sauce and serve it with rice. (There are some excellent notes on that recipe. I like the one that reduces the amount of sugar in the caramel to a scant two tablespoons. That’s a valid hack.) You could make coconut curry vegetable soup with vermicelli. You could make grilled cheese sandwiches and serve them with tomato soup. Give one of those a shot and see where it leaves you after dinner. In happiness, is what I’m guessing, in a state of contented grace.
Later this week: Try the easiest chicken noodle soup (above). See how you do with these sheet-pan sausages glazed with honey mustard and cooked with brussels sprouts and potatoes. Haul out your pressure cooker to make speedy beef pho. Or give this coconut shrimp curry with mushrooms a try.
Definitely make Mexican hot chocolate one morning for breakfast, send everyone out of the house with a smile. And absolutely end a day with a wok full of three-cup chicken, a taste of Taiwan.
You can find thousands and thousands of other recipes to feed yourself and those around you on NYT Cooking. Browse around and see what you like, just the way people used to choose movies at the Blockbuster in town. (Yes, I’ll say yet again, you need a subscription to access our site, to save recipes and organize them. Thank you for yours.)
We post a lot of inspirational food-related material on Facebook as well, and on Instagram. On Twitter, we link to our news articles. You should visit us on YouTube while you’re up and about.
And if you run into trouble with anything along the way, whether it’s cooking, technology or your emotional state, please write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.
Now, it’s been a busy time and we’ve been talking a lot about cooking, but I want to make sure you didn’t miss “The Lives They Lived,” an annual accounting of some of the lives our culture lost in 2019, in The New York Times Magazine.
