Good Bread Good Meat Good God Let's Eat : Recipes

Monday, October 5, 2015

Recipes

Rikki Snyder for The New York Times

MONDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2015

SAM SIFTON

Good morning. We put on a good face here, generally, making as if cooking's always a joy. It isn't, of course. Why, here's an old etching now, from Rembrandt, 1635, showing exactly our expression yesterday as we prepared breakfast for the squabble of children assembled around us. If it weren't for the storm surge and swells pushed along by Joaquin, we'd have been out on the water chasing fish with a fly rod, the glorious northeastern fall run of them foaming all around us at the Point. It was not to be.
Not to mention, now it's Monday. Time's arrow flies fast at the top of the week, and on it sails our ambition. That roast duck we're thinking we can blaze out for the family after work may seem perfectly manageable when we click on the recipe and save it away. But this evening, after some nudnik pulls the emergency cord on the A train between stations on the way home and doubles our commute? It's not going to happen. Your circumstances may differ. But on a Monday, they won't differ a lot. Cooking on Mondays is hard.
Here's solace: my ridiculously easy recipe for miso-roasted chicken thighs (above), which you could serve with steamed greens and a pot of rice. Here's more: Melissa Clark's simple recipe for roasted fish, which'll put supper on the table in about 20 minutes. How about a warm curried chickpea salad, loaded with herbs? Or for the truly desperate, Roy Choi's recipe for perfect instant ramen? (Don't hate: It's incredible.)
Maybe you'll roast sweet potatoes, off Tamar Adler's adaptation of her brother's recipe for them, with yogurt and sesame seeds. You could hurry by the fishmonger and pick up fillets for Melissa's recipe for salmon with a sweet-and-sour sauce.
Or if you're really, truly jammed up for time, you could make as we sometimes do at the top of the week, look into the refrigerator, and cut all the vegetables we can find into cubes of roughly the same size, then roast them in a hot oven with a bunch of sausage meat strewn over the top because we like sausage. You could easily omit the meat and drizzle the pan with olive oil, salt and black pepper.
Other (actual) recipes to cook tonight are at Cooking. Please save the ones you're interested in cooking to your NYT Cooking recipe box so you don't lose track of them. (Save them from anywhere on the web now, just as if they came from The Times. Here's how.) If you run into problems, with the recipes or with anything to do with our site or apps, please reach out for help: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We have good people standing by.
Now, have you read Choire Sicha on Ina Garten yet? It's a winding tale, fun to read, with some pointed language about Martha Stewart, and it will be on the final exam. So read it at lunch! See you on Wednesday.