Good morning. I’ll eat oatmeal for breakfast every day for a month, adding blueberries and drizzling the bowl with maple syrup and cream. Then, for no reason I can discern, it’s a toasted English muffin with salted butter and a schmear of strawberry preserves, or a slice of Cheddar, or sometimes both.
Three weeks later, I can’t look at a muffin. All I want is a fried egg dotted with hot sauce, and that’s all I want every morning until I don’t.
Lately, I’ve been on a granola kick, and a specific granola at that: the one from Eleven Madison Park (above) that they gave you after a meal at the restaurant when Will Guidara was running the front of the house, an early example of his unreasonable hospitality.
The recipe’s not his. It comes from the restaurant’s chef and owner, Daniel Humm, a taste of his Zurich childhood: rolled oats with brown sugar and a hint of maple syrup, with coconut chips, shelled pistachios and pumpkin seeds. There are some dried cherries in there, too, and a healthy dose of kosher salt to even everything out.
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Eleven Madison Park Granola
I like it with Greek yogurt, but it’s terrific with whole milk, too, and doesn’t do poorly at all on its own, like a kind of trail mix. On a Sunday morning in the middle of winter, I might use it as a topping for waffles and then skip lunch. Burgers for dinner? I think so, yes.
With Sunday sorted, we can turn to the rest of the week. …
Monday
I love Vivian Chan-Tam’s recipe for hot and sour soup for how hot and sour it is, how porky and silken, how mushroomy, how rich. The dry-spiced tofu in it is superb, but if you can’t find any, no matter: Add an extra whisper of soy sauce and a pinch of five-spice powder instead.
Tuesday
Here’s a recipe for a turmeric-hued chicken and vermicelli soup from Naz Deravian. It’s thicker than you might imagine, more substantial, with a depth of flavor that’s brightened at the end with lime juice: a welcome sunset flash.
Wednesday
Those who haven’t yet gotten on board the Packaged Gnocchi Express would do well to make Sheela Prakash’s new recipe for skillet gnocchi alla vodka, which pairs the pan-fried dumplings with a classic Italian American vodka sauce. You’ll start buying a bag of the stuff every week. Would I hit it with extra red-pepper flakes for heat? I would.
Thursday
Anna Francese Gass’s recipe for crispy lemon chicken cutlets with salmoriglio sauce sounds fancy, even potentially difficult. (Salmoriglio!) It is neither. You’re just shallow-frying breaded cutlets and dressing them in a garlicky lemon sauce with parsley. I like that with pasta dressed in butter and Parmesan.
Friday
And then you can head into the weekend with the YouTube star Maangchi’s recipe for bulgogi, adapted by Julia Moskin, to serve with lettuce and perilla leaves (if you can find them), kimchi, ssamjang and rice. We think of bulgogi as a grilled meal, but it’s fantastic cooked on a ripping-hot cast-iron pan.
If you’re looking for something else entirely (larb gai, say), go browse New York Times Cooking and see what you discover. You’ll need a subscription to do that, of course. Subscriptions make this whole fandango possible. If you haven’t taken one out yet, would you consider subscribing today? Thanks.
If you have questions about your account, hoist up the Charlie and Bravo flags and write cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or if you’d like to bark at me, or offer a compliment to my colleagues, you can reach me at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read every one I get.
Now, it’s a considerable distance from anything to do with scones or rarebits, but here’s a new poem from Susan Barba in The New York Review of Books, “Player Piano.”
David Samuels, in County Highway, wrote about (among other things) seeing the Eagles at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Wondrous strange.
The chef André Soltner died last week at the age of 92. William Grimes wrote his obituary for The Times. And this week, a sad shock from San Francisco: Charles Phan of the Slanted Door died at 62. Kim Severson had the obituary in our pages.
Finally, it’s Lucinda Williams’s birthday. She’s 72. Here she is about a decade ago, singing “East Side of Town” in the studios of KEXP in Seattle. Listen to that while you’re cooking. I’ll be back next week.
