Go for the gold: The Best Breakfast

View in Browser

Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book.

Andrew Purcell for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Carrie Purcell.

Monday, December 28, 2020

The Best Breakfast

Sam Sifton

Good morning. We’re hurtling toward the end of the year now, a year that’s been like no other any of us has experienced, and I made a pizza and ate it with my daughter and walked the dog and got to thinking about how much better I hope 2021 will be for all of us and particularly for those who read this newsletter in search of a measure of hope and deliciousness against the torrent of dark news and difficult days.

Then I went home and baked. Peanut butter miso cookies for all, a recipe to vanquish despair! I slept pretty well for once, that night.

In the morning, I had bacon and eggs. Genevieve Ko came up with this ace recipe for a sheet-pan breakfast (above) as a way to ease breakfast over the Christmas holiday, but I’ve come to believe it’s a game-changer for winter weekday mornings, and my new favorite way to greet the day. I get that going in the oven, toast buns or English muffins and make no-fuss breakfast sandwiches that I’d be proud to sell from a cart on the corner.

Here’s what else I’m getting up to in the kitchen, in this strange lull of a week before the New Year: spaghetti and meatballs; cinnamon crumb cake muffins; maple-baked salmon; mushroom Bourguignon.

I’ve mentioned the caviar sandwiches I want to make for New Year’s Eve, but I reckon there are other choices, too. Tournedos Rossini, for instance? Or chicken La Tulipe? We’ve put together a collection of recipes appropriate to the night. Pick one today and plan for it. Making the night special, bidding good riddance to the year, is one way to be hopeful at a time when hope, vaccines notwithstanding, is so thin on the ground.

And then for the first day of 2021? I want to spend it making this onion tart that Gabrielle Hamilton ginned up in tribute to André Soltner, working through the recipe slowly and carefully, with the close attention I’d like to bring to the entire coming year.

Thousands and thousands more recipes to cook right now, and in the days and weeks and months to come are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go take a spin through them and see what you find. Save the recipes you want to cook. Rate the ones you’ve made. And leave notes on them, too, if you want to remind yourself of a hack or substitution, or if you want to share it with your fellow subscribers.

You do need to be a subscriber to do all that, yes. Subscriptions support NYT Cooking and allow it to continue. I hope if you’re able that you will subscribe to NYT Cooking today. Thanks.

As always, we will be standing by to help should anything go sideways while you’re cooking or using our site and apps. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (Or you can reach me directly at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it’s nothing to do with sea bream or pistachios, but you should probably read Allison P. Davis in The Cut, on living with Karens in the leafy suburb of Montclair, N.J.

More Montclair: Here’s Joe Hagan on Stephen Colbert in Vanity Fair.

And Ligaya Mishan in T, on the long and tortured history of cancel culture.

Finally, here’s Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, live in Nashville in 2014, “Statesboro Blues.” Enjoy that and I’ll be back on Wednesday.