What to Cook This Week

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Good morning! I’ve got a new “Eat” column for you to read today, about how I tried to make a little savory treat I had not long ago at the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., and about how it turned out great, but how in the end the dinner that followed — a meal one of the kids got me to cook, her riffing off the memory of something her friend made recently and me taking instruction at the stove — was transcendent. That is the way of the world, sometimes. We aim for one thing in our cooking. Then another thing brings the thrill. Who knew?

Of course we ginned up a proper recipe for it: risotto with sausage and parsley (above). I think you should make that tonight. It is home cooking at its best, a dish that’s ideal to make with friends or family crowded tight in the kitchen, everyone talking and talking as you stir and stir.

Then, on Monday night, I like the idea of soup, and a vegetarian soup at that. Our pal Alison Roman gave us two to consider. One’s for a fine recipe for broccoli and Cheddar soup that tastes of like what you always think this soup should taste of when you’re on the road and order it off the menu at the only restaurant open near the hotel: broccoli and cheese. (At the restaurant, invariably, it tastes only of salt.) It’s so good.

The other is for a vegetarian tortilla soup that draws a lot of flavor from canned chipotles in adobo, and spreads it through tomatoes and corn. Lots of raw crisp onion and cilantro and a handful of fried tortilla strips added at the end add texture, and brightness. Top with crema, cheese and some squeezed lime juice.

Either way, you should keep up the Roman theme for dessert, and try Alison’s crazily good recipe for salted chocolate chunk shortbread cookies, a highlight of her excellent new cookbook, “Dining In: Highly Cookable Recipes.”

Tuesday you might consider Moroccan-style smothered chicken with a whole lot of olives, a recipe Alex Witchel secured from the great Paula Wolfert back in 2002. I think it would be very nice with an herb-flecked rice pilaf.

For Wednesday, for many the hardest cooking night of the week, you can take it easy and make this adaptation of Jamie Oliver’s recipe for creamy pasta with smoked bacon and peas (get double-smoked bacon if you can!). Or, look, you can give yourself permission to order a grandma pie from your favorite pizzeria, eat it with their vinegar-soaked Italian salad and watch “Fearless” on Amazon Prime. I do not judge. That’s a good meal.

Thursday night: shrimp alla marinara, I think. (With Samin Nosrat’s herbed garlic bread for the win!)

And then on Friday you can celebrate week’s end with Melissa Clark’s pan-seared steak with red-wine sauce and Gabrielle Hamilton’s pommes Anna right next to it. (You fancy, huh?)

Approximately a gajillion other recipes to cook this week are available at NYT Cooking. Go take a look and see what you find. Then cook! You can always get in touch with us if something goes wrong. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. We’ll get back to you.

Now, what are you doing next weekend? The Boat Show is at the Javits Center here in New York, and I’d love to go see if Frank Crescitelli’s going to be there with the beautiful Buddy Davis boats he reps, with their wide Carolina flare. But that’s just me, and anyway I can’t go because I’ll be working those days at The New York Times Travel Show in the same building.

Come see me and my Times colleagues if you’re in town. We’ll be interviewing a whole bunch of interesting people on stage, among them: Andrew Zimmern, Action Bronson, Zac Posen, the Ghetto Gastro crew, Claudia Wu and Angela Dimayuga. You can register here. Use the code NYTCOOK to get $5 off admission. Say hi!

Or just stay home and read. Dwight Garner has us melancholy-hyped to get started on Denis Johnson’s posthumous collection of short stories, “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden.” And I missed Lauren Collins’s piece in The New Yorker about the French novelist Leila Slimani; it makes me want to start “The Perfect Nanny” maybe even before the Johnson. So there is much to do in coming days. Let’s get to it!