Traditional Japanese Lunch. The first week of the new year has been one triumph over another in the culinary department. It began with an authentic Japanese lunch on New Year’s Day, prepared entirely by the wife of a colleague. It was amazing!

Sourdough Bread. January 2nd was not too soon for another year of making bread. This time I departed from my favorite formulas, and I made two loaves with less whole grain flour — 90% white bread and 10% Yecora Rojo whole wheat. They fit my mood at the time.

Fried bread is always a winner. Here is one slice of sourdough topped with my wife’s Ratatouille, next to a piece of my seeded rye bread with a coarse bean purée and pickled onions.

Mussels – Brittany-Style. One of best things to do with a crispy-crusted white bread is to sop up the juices from a batch of mussels, steamed as they would be in France

Homemade Tagliatelle and Caramelized Onions. It has been a while since I made pasta from scratch, so I was eager to start that again. Ingredients: flour, egg, and salt. The flour choices were simple: from Gustiamo, 72 grams of Maiorca Sicilian ‘double-zero’ style flour and 50 grams of Semola Rimacinata Sicilian all-purpose style flour. I decided to use one whole egg and one egg yolk to mix in with the flours. We had some lovely pullet eggs, and they were small enough to be just right with these flour amounts.

For once I had plenty of time for cooking, so I made caramelized onions, which takes about an hour of slow cooking in the sauteuse. Another long process, in parallel, was the roasting of cherry tomatoes. The package I had purchased recently looked pretty, but as is often the case this time of year, was short on flavor and not at all sweet. Slow-roasting improves them, so I set the oven to 250° F. and let cook for about 2 hours. About 1/2 cup of tomato Passata would help the ingredients blend together. The final addition was zucchini, cut into medium dice. The cooked pasta was added to the vegetables, enhanced with some pasta water, and freshly-grated Pecorino.

As usual, we have some leftovers for the next day or two.

Spanish Mussels Vinaigrette. The rest of the mussels were done a couple of days later, using a lovely recipe from Penelope Casas, one of the great writers about Spanish food. This dish lasted me two more days as a lunch and an appetizer. It is also one of the most attractive meals I’ve ever made.

Two-legged Octopus with Roasted Tardivo. Did you ever have a meal that tasted great but was a total disaster visually? I just made one of those.

My last meal for this post was unusual in several ways. I had purchased two legs of an octopus at New Deal Fish market on Wednesday, so I wanted to use them last night. Using a variation on Chef John’s Spanish braised octopus, I cooked the legs in about an hour and a half. Instead of the overnight bath in olive oil and citrus that I usually use to finish my octopus, I did a shortcut with just Meyer lemon juice, sea salt, and Maras pepper. The colors were more muted than usual, but not too bad.

Octopus pairs so well with potatoes that I parboiled and then roasted a handful of fingerling potatoes, The ones I had we a purple variety, and they were quite dark after roasting. The final element that ended up tasting the best and looked the least attractive was a head of Radicchio Tardivo, an obscure variety that I found at Eataly Boston and was eager to try. 

These all came together in a wonderful supper. Unfortunately, you can see it but not taste it. The final touch was the wine, a 2016 Nero di Troia.