Breakfast

This Korean breakfast sandwich, often sold on the street in the morning around bus stations and universities, is filled with a vegetable and ham omelet and topped with ketchup and brown sugar.

Fruit soup is not really a soup, it’s more like a fruit-based tapioca pudding. When I was first served fruit soup by my mother-in-law, Ann Marie, I recognized it as chia pudding’s older Swedish cousin. My mother-in-law serves it for dessert with fresh cream and a plate of butter cookies, but I think it’s a perfect breakfast alongside some full-fat yogurt and a handful of granola. Note: This recipe requires at least 6 hours of chilling time.

Golden, crunchy, and covered in a salty, frico-like layer of baked Parmesan, this is sort of like a giant gougère-style cheese puff meets Yorkshire pudding, with a crisp outer crust and a soft, cheesy, custardy interior. If you’re not shy (or not serving this to a shy group), feel free to tear this apart with your hands to eat, licking the salty bits of cheese and herbs off your fingers when you’re done (if this is too tactile for you, use a large spoon for serving). You can serve this for dinner with a big salad or with some kind of roasted meat, or try it for brunch in place of the usual sweet and fruity Dutch babies that people expect. Or, for something completely out of the box, this also happens to make a fantastic cocktail nosh—serve it right out of the oven, still in the pan, to your guests and let them tear off pieces. It’s quite delicious with a gin martini.

When it comes to fried eggs, there are some people who prefer a pristine, pillowy white, without any trace of browning or crispness. I am not one of them. When I want a cushion of soft egg white, I poach. For me the perfect fried egg has a white that curls and ruffles as soon as it makes contact with the hot fat in the pan, turning lacy and crunchy at the edges while remaining plump and soft at the yolk, which should run like hot lava at the merest touch of your fork. This recipe achieves exactly that, using olive oil as the frying medium. But what really elevates this dish are the sweet fried scallions and woodsy fried sage leaves that get caught in the white. They turn a plain breakfast staple into an unusual and very quick dinner. Serve this with toasted country bread or flatbread, and maybe a big salad if you need some vegetables. Consider this a light dinner, for nights after you’ve had a big lunch, when you’re peckish rather than starving.

These rolls make a decadent brunch, served warm from the oven, with a pot of good strong coffee on the side.

Out of all my mom’s greatest breakfast hits, dahi toast is easily the most the beloved in our family. This sandwich—a loose interpretation of a recipe from one of my dad’s friends—is totally unexpected (who would ever think to put yogurt between bread?!) and impossible not to like. Imagine a tangier, spicier grilled cheese sandwich. You get that satisfying oily bread crunch, but with onions, chiles, and (my favorite part) a crispy topping of black mustard seeds and curry leaves added into the mix. The glue that holds this recipe together is the tang of the sourdough bread—it’s the perfect foil to the rich, ricotta-like filling. We are a house divided when it comes to accompaniments for dahi toast—my mom and sister like cilantro chutney, while I prefer ketchup. My dad uses both: He swirls the chutney and ketchup together to create a kinda ugly-colored but admittedly delicious super-sauce.

Not a side dish at all, this is a well-stocked breakfast entrée. Make sure the potatoes are diced — that is, in 1/2-inch cubes. They must be small and evenly sized to cook in the stated time. Skip processed sandwich meat and look for whole, roasted smoked ham at the deli counter. Have the butcher cut it into 1/2-inch slices to make the dicing easier for you.

There are a few things that are crucial to making an epic frittata...

These eggs are exactly what they sound like: fried eggs combined with teeny croutons. I like them on top of vegetables or rice bowls. You can add a sprinkling of herbs like dill to the pan, but not too much while you’re cooking the eggs—you don’t want to introduce excess water. As written, this recipe makes fried eggs with little salty, crunchy breadcrumb bits embedded in them. If you want to go breadcrumb-crazy, or if you have more than one slice to use up, tear up 2 or 3 slices of bread. In Step 4, you’ll need to scooch the breadcrumbs aside in spots to make little nests that you can crack the eggs into.