I can’t remember when I started keeping kimchi in my fridge, and I certainly don’t know what I ever did without it. With a hefty red-lidded jug of spicy, funky fermented napa cabbage kimchi beaming at me, I have the foundation for all sorts of fast, hugely flavorful dinners. Kimchi fried rice. Kimchi noodle soup. These sheet-pan pierogies with brussels sprouts and kimchi, which someone at a holiday party told me is their favorite New York Times Cooking recipe, and this kimchi grilled cheeseslotsmash, which is my favorite grilled cheese.

Now I (we) have this recipe for a salmon and kimchi skillet, a recipe from Sarah DiGregorio that’s already racked up five stars. Just five ingredients are needed (not counting salt or the optional chopped scallions and sesame seeds to finish): salmon, butter, sesame oil, sugar and kimchi, with those last two caramelizing in the pan to round out the acidic edges of the kimchi. It’s exactly the sort of bright dinner I want to kick-start my taste buds after a Thanksgiving feast.

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Also five ingredients: this miso chicken, an NYT Cooking classic from Sam Sifton with over 10,000 reviews. (Two words: miso butter.) Tejal Rao’s eggs kejriwal is a similarly simple stunner, a spicy egg-and-cheese toast that’s just as nice for breakfast as it is for a satisfying, light dinner.

Pizza dough, either store-bought or homemade, is a great thing to keep in your fridge or freezer so you can eat pizza anytime (with all due respect to the good folks at Bagel Bites). Ali Slagle’s creamed kale pizza is just the thing to make when I want the security blanket of pizza with the goodness of dark leafy greens.

Melissa Clark’s turkey, farro and chickpea soup calls for leftover turkey and turkey broth, but you can also use chicken and chicken stock. The canned chickpeas and fridge staples (an onion, a carrot or two and the remainder of that can of tomato paste) make this a breeze to pull together; the baharat spice blend (or garam masala or curry powder) keeps things warm and cozy.

To wrap things up — and herald the coming of Cookie Week! — here are peanut butter blossoms, a recipe from the Gerrero family adapted by The New York Times. Speaking from experience, the hardest part of making these classic cookies is unwrapping all the chocolate kisses and placing them on your sugared peanut butter cookie dough balls and not straight into your mouth. Several readers suggest using miniature chocolate peanut butter cups instead of chocolate kissesslotsmash, which I’m assuming opens up some sort of chocolate peanut butter portal to an alternate cookie dimension.

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