Good morning. There’s a little bite to the morning air these days, at least in the part of the world I call home. It calls for hot coffee below the predawn velvet sky, and something sturdy to eat before work and school and projects and appointments and sports and friends and theater and art keep us apart for the bulk of the day. Breakfast season’s upon us!
Accordingly, I stalk supermarket sales at night: croissants at a dollar a pop at the end of the day. Buy four or five, enough to make Melissa Clark’s breakfast casserole (above). She calls for Italian sausage. Sometimes I use breakfast sausage instead, or omit it entirely. It’s awesome.
I make steel-cut oats in the rice cooker before bed: 4 cups of water to 1 of oats, and they’re ready to go in the morning, the machine resting on “warm.” Just add cream, or milk, or butter, fruit, maple syrup, molasses, nuts. Hard men and women might try crumbled bacon and a wee drizzle of Scotch. (Here’s a recipe for overnight rolled oats, which some prefer to steel-cut.)
A diner breakfast can answer, if you can wake a little early to make it. (If you can’t, try an egg-in-a-hole, known in some circles as a Guy Kibbee, instead.) Make some biscuits. Bake some morning glory muffins. Make the best scrambled eggs.
The idea is simply to recognize breakfast as a chance to do more than refuel, to use the meal as a way to celebrate togetherness in advance of a day on the autumnal march.
And then if you can manage to cook dinner later in the day, well, so much the better. Melissa has a terrific new recipe for a pantry-charged spaghetti with caramelized onions, olives and herbs. It won’t come quick. I’m not going to lie to you and say caramelizing onions is only the work of a quarter-hour. But the labor is easy and relaxing and yields a meal with big flavor at its end.
How much did you love Julia Moskin’s recipe last week for chicken francese? Here’s a new variation on it that I think you’ll love as well: David Tanis’s recipe for flounder with brown butter, lemon and tarragon, oh, my.
Other dinners you could cook tonight or this week include Rishia Zimmern’s shockingly good chicken with shallots and my passably delicious takeout-style sesame noodles, which I think would be ace with a broccoli salad with garlic and sesame.
Still more dinner, lunch and breakfast ideas can be found in the neat stacks of NYT Cooking. As at the Chained Library at Hereford Cathedral in Britain, you’ll need a sort of key to access the works. We call ours a subscription. Get one today and pass the word to a friend.
Remember all the while: We are standing by to help if something goes wrong along the way. Just write us at cookingcare@nytimes.com. We’ll get you sorted. (If something goes right, please share pictures of and stories about your cooking on our Facebook page, or tag us on Instagram. We love to hit “like.”)
Now, it’s a far step from velveting flounder or slicing sesame bagels for a morning schmear, but Daniel Mendelsohn on book 6 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” is really delightful. (I don’t respond to Knausgaard’s whistle. But I delight in friends who do. Melissa Clark once told me she loves his prose as if he were a “really bad boyfriend.”)
Anglers Journal ran an excerpt from a 1952 novel I’d never heard of but am now tracking hard, “The Shining Tides,” by Win Brooks.
Finally, not really off topic at all for once, “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management” was published in Britain on this day in 1861. It was immediately and for a long time thereafter a best-seller, the first mega-cookbook of the modern age.
And no wonder. Check out this cabbage soup: “Ingredients: 1 large cabbage, 3 carrots, 2 onions, 4 or 5 slices of lean bacon, salt and pepper to taste, 2 quarts of medium stock No. 105. Mode: Scald the cabbage, exit it up and drain it. Line the stewpan with the bacon, put in the cabbage, carrots, and onions; moisten with skimmings from the stock, and simmer very gently, till the cabbage is tender; add the stock, stew softly for half an hour, and carefully skim off every particle of fat. Season and serve.”
I bet that’s pretty good even if you don’t use medium stock No. 105! See you on Wednesday.
