Good morning. Yesterday led into a long night for newspaper peopleand all those who bird-dog the mood of the nation and the actions of its electorate. Today, pundits will try to tell us what happened and why it matters or doesn’t. Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, it may leave you more exhausted still. A good meal is in order, simple to cook, delicious to eat.
I like this green shakshuka with avocado with lime (above). Drink a San Antonio-style margarita while it cooks. Eat it with warm tortillas. That’s a delight.
I like this tarragon chicken of Nigella Lawson’s, to serve on a bed of butter lettuce.
And I dig this roasted cauliflower gratin with tomatoes and goat cheese: hippie comfort food, best consumed in candlelight, with madrigals playing.
So that’s tonight, and off to bed early, at least for me. You may be celebrating the start of Diwali, the festival of lights! If so we’ve got plenty of recipes for sparkly holiday eats: for main dishes, for starters and sides and for desserts. Happy Diwali!
Tomorrow, well, there’s a sandwich one of my kids has been eating for years now, a ham and cheese number they serve at the Orient Country Store at the far end of Long Island in New York. You could have it for lunch, but it makes for a stellar breakfast if you lay in the supplies correctly. In keeping with our Wednesday tradition, you won’t need a recipe.
Just get some thin-sliced deli ham and your favorite variety of apple, along with Brie of the best quality you can manage, a little Dijon mustard and a baguette. Leave the cheese on the countertop overnight, so you can use it to butter the baguette in the morning, quite thickly. Then layer less ham than you’d think on top of the cheese, along with a run of thin-sliced apple, with a light wisp of mustard. It makes for a substantial morning feed, but you could add a fried egg to the situation, if you’re hungry or your work puts you outside and laboring in a physical way.
Then: Make gyros for dinner, or seafood chowder, or vegetarian mapo tofu, or avocado toast.
Or make something else. Thousands and thousands more recipes are on NYT Cooking, including everything you need to plan for and execute a perfect Thanksgiving feast. Go browse our aisles (fair warning: You need a subscription) to see what appeals. And then save what recipes you like to your recipe box. You can organize them in folders. You can send them to friends. And: You can send yourself grocery lists. I love that last feature hard.
Naturally, we’ll be standing by to help, should anything go wrong, either with a recipe or with the technology we use to power our site and apps. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com and we’ll scramble a Jayhawk to bring you to safety. (Speaking of, here are the Jayhawks plural, live with a very young Jon Stewart in 1995, “Blue.”)
Now, it’s nothing to do with eggplants or Riesling, but Brent Staples has me reading the historian David W. Blight’s new biography, “Frederick Douglass.”
