Good morning. Hanukkah gets underway this evening, and perhaps that brings latkes to your table, a roast chicken, some kugel (above), maybe rugelach for dessert. (Take a look at our best Hanukkah recipes for more.)
For myself, I might nod to the holiday with the okonomi-latke that I learned to make one winter evening in the apartment of the chefs Sawako Okochi and Aaron Israel of Shalom Japan in Brooklyn. Pile that pancake high with salmon roe. It’s non-religiously delicious! Follow with niku udon, a Japanese beef soup, and a platter of jelly doughnuts to send you to bed. That would make for a very fine day of cooking and eating.
As for the rest of the week …
Monday
Melissa Clark’s recipe for shakshuka with feta takes a classic North African breakfast dish and brings it home for dinner, with silky eggs and melting nuggets of salty feta cheese to offset the warm spices of the sauce. (Here’s a classic Moroccan version, if you’d prefer that.)
Tuesday
Kay Chun developed this recipe for glass noodles with shrimp and spicy mustard sauce. It’s dead easy to make and incredibly flavorful. Yes, you can use hot English mustard powder in place of the Asian variety, though it doesn’t throw quite so hard of a punch.
Wednesday
Here’s Ali Slagle’s crispy pepperoni chicken, a homage to a dish served at Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli’s exemplary Don Angie restaurant in Manhattan. In Ali’s recipe, you sauté bread crumbs with chopped pepperoni to create a salty, crunchy, fiery topping for seared chicken. (I might use that stuff to top chicken thighs, then roast them crisp in a hot oven.)
Friday
And then on Friday, in keeping with my belief that you should never, ever cook a holiday meal for the first time on the holiday itself, try a rehearsal for New Year’s Eve: Genevieve Ko’s outstanding roasted beef tenderloin with horseradish sauce, or her roasted side of salmon with miso cream. They provide the best sort of celebration food, dishes that you can mostly make ahead and serve at room temperature.
Many thousands more recipes to cook this week are waiting for you on New York Times Cooking — and we post further inspiration on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Explore our best holiday recipes while you’re at it.
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Now, it’s a far cry from tostones or black-eyed peas, but Dwight Garner, in The New York Times, put me onto the latest book collecting obituaries from The Daily Telegraph in London, “Eccentric Lives.” I’m glad he did. Dwight: “There is an obit here of the Right Rev. Eamon Casey, an Irish bon vivant who left the country after he was found to have fathered a son. The boy’s mother, described here as ‘a 26-year-old American divorcée,’ wrote a memoir in which she asked about his abilities in the bedroom: ‘He was a goddamn bishop. Where had he learnt all this?’ ”
Tell the truth. Have you read “The Gift of the Magi,” by O. Henry, first published in 1905? Either way, y’oughta today.
Ellen Wexler from the Smithsonian Magazine wrote about the discovery of a recording of “Phinney’s Rainbow,” which Stephen Sondheim wrote in 1948 as an 18-year-old sophomore at Williams College in Massachusetts. Interesting!
Finally, the painter Paul Klee was born on this day in 1879. (He died in 1940, and The Times took a wire story.) Here’s his “Tänzerin,” from 1932. Consider that, and I’ll see you on Friday. Melissa will write tomorrow.
