What to Cook This Week

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Good morning. The feast of the Epiphany was yesterday, Twelfth Night for some, and if you didn’t make Dorie Greenspan’s recipe for galette des rois to celebrate, you really ought to today. It’s delicious, and will bring good luck all year if your slice holds the little trinket traditionally baked into the cake. (Dorie calls for a bean. My mother used a ring. In New Orleans, where a different kind of king cake is served during Mardi Gras, they use a little plastic baby. I like these porcelain dudes.)

So make the cake! And have it for dessert this evening after eating something hearty against the cold that grips a big part of the country right now. Perhaps Regina Schrambling’s justly famous recipe for beef stew with Dijon and Cognac? Or this insanely good recipe for Caribbean stew I read about in an old Jim Harrison story and tested into reality? You’ll absolutely love Melissa Clark’s recipe for Japanese chicken and root vegetable stew.

On Monday, I think you should keep up the theme, with a pot of spiced brown lentils with yogurt that is rather thicker than stew.

Tuesday night might be good for a plate of halibut with brown butter, lemon and sage, and you should cook it even if you don’t have halibut. Flounder would be a good substitute, as would sea scallops; down in Florida, I’d use grouper instead.

Pasta with parsnips and bacon would make an excellent Wednesday night meal. I made a good version for years, just out of my head, a take on a dish I once ate in a restaurant. Then I tried Melissa’s recipe, and it was like discovering an extra room in an apartment you already love. Cook that for sure.

Thursday: Fight the Bolsheviks with a couple of white Russians. Then order a pizza and do as The Times’s James Poniewozik suggested right at the end of 2017: Watch “American Vandal” on Netflix. (What, no recipe tonight? Hey, you made the cocktails, didn’t you?)

Then on Friday night, please round out the week with pork gyros or chicken shawarma. It’s early yet, but 2018 is looking very good thus far.

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Now, before we head off to cook pupusas and curtido, how about a pop quiz, nothing to do with food? Tell me your top 5 novels and why you chose them: foodeditor@nytimes.com. The mail’s been coming in heavily of late so I don’t want to promise that I’ll get back to each person who writes. But I will read everything sent. I’m looking for themes!

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