Very good early morning. “Tomorrow was yet another working day, at the very least by the calendar,” the novelist Patrick O’Brian wrote in “Blue at the Mizzen,” “but the two could hardly be explained to aside: the heat, the faintly drifting cloud, the ship pitching intensely with no way on her, the flaccid sails, ended up all the same.” It is been like that for a lot of us lately, caught on our ships in the doldrums of lockdown, marking the passage of time with foods that choose on an unrelenting sameness: a breakfast, a lunch, a evening meal, repeat.

Maybe which is you, as well? How to get out of it, I imagine, is to cook anyway, and to cook issues that are new to us, things we’ve never ever cooked before, foods to surprise and delight. The strategy is to achieve what the coaches of corporate tradition simply call “state change.” It is time to get out of our heads.

For instance, I like the passion that our Tejal Rao has for the barbecue rooster pizza (previously mentioned) that she ate as a boy or girl at the shopping mall, and I’ll make my own to see if I can’t share it with her as a gentleman in his kitchen, far from the mall. And I’ve by no means experienced brown-butter lentil and sweet potato salad. So let’s see what that’s like.

I’ll make my individual mozzarella in carrozza, a cafe favored I’ve under no circumstances cooked myself. I’ll do the same with this winter season vegetable soup with turnips, carrots, potatoes and leeks. I’ll make pâte à choux, Boston product doughnuts, pan-seared gyoza, vegan queso just simply because!

And I’ll prepare dinner for the foreseeable future, much too, experimenting with some new-to-me Thanksgiving sides: added-crispy Parmesan-crusted roast potatoes, for illustration, or kaddu, a kind of sweet and bitter stew of butternut squash that Priya Krishna launched me to. Have by no means created it. Now I will. Condition alter.

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Now, it’s a very long ocean journey from rooster and dumplings, but these days is the birthday of the singer Diana Krall. She’s 56. Below she is with “East of the Sunshine (And West of the Moon).”