Good morning! Today we have for you:

• Alexa Weibel’s five-star crispy tofu tacos

• One-pot miso-turmeric salmon and coconut rice

• And, a comforting khichdi recipe for your pressure cooker

One of the many things I love about cooking is that even if you’ve been eating a certain food for as long as you can remember, you can still learn new ways to use and enjoy it.

Take, for instance, tofu. I grew up on the stuff, with a block of firm or silken tofu always ready in the fridge for my mom’s Japanese cooking. (A favorite snack or side of mine was cold tofu sliced into neat cubes, drizzled with soy sauce and sprinkled with furikake for a sort of slapdash hiyayakko. Delicious.) I’m no stranger to tofu in dishes like shira-ae or mabo dofu, in which the tofu is smashed or simmered, but always recognizably tofu. (That last one, by the way, is the Japanese take on mapo tofu, usually less spicy but no less delicious.)

But firm tofu that’s been grated into happily chaotic little crumbles, assertively seasoned and roasted until sizzling and crispy, and then tucked into warm corn tortillas with avocado cream, red onion, radishes and cilantro? I have not had that, but wow, would I like to.

Leave it to Alexa Weibel — the wizard behind so many of our readers’ favorite vegetarian recipes — to create crispy tofu tacos that are actually, blessedly, crispy. “The key step,” she writes, “is to drizzle the tofu with a combination of olive oil and tomato paste toward the end of cooking, which crisps the edges and lends a deep umami flavor, so much so that this tofu could almost be mistaken for seasoned ground beef.”

Her recipe is included in Ali Slagle’s new guide to cooking tofu, which comes complete with seven easy tips and some of our most-loved tofu recipes. And given the reader comments on Lex’s recipe, I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes one of our most-loved recipes, period. Here’s one:

“In 45 years I’ve never had tofu and wanted to try incorporating more meatless meals into our diet. The rave reviews and lots of seasonings intrigued me and OMG this is one of the best recipes I’ve ever made and best tacos I’ve ever had. I can’t get over just how good this was.”

Featured Recipe

Crispy Tofu Tacos

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That recipe and Ali’s guide are great places to start if one of your 2026 goals is to cook more (or better) vegetarian meals. And if you’d like to take better care of your brain as well as your stomach, you’ll want to try out Well’s five-day brain health challenge, which starts Monday. You can sign up for that here.

Today’s specials

One-pot miso turmeric salmon and coconut rice: When my husband was scrolling through 2025’s most popular recipes, he stopped on this dish and said: “That looks good. We should make this.” So I’m leaving this here for us as a reminder to make this five-star, 40-minute one-pot dish from Yasmin Fahr; please use this reminder for yourself, as well.

Jamie Oliver’s eggplant Parmesan: If you’re about to pass over this dish because you’re thinking, very understandably, that there’s no way you’re going to bread and fry eggplant slices, don’t worry. In this recipe, adapted by Marian Burros, those eggplant planks are instead roasted until golden brown and layered with a quick tomato sauce and a sprinkling of Parm. Bread crumbs mixed with (optional) fresh oregano and olive oil provide a crunchy topping. Though I haven’t tried it yet, I’ll bet if you roughly chopped up the leftovers and tossed them with cooked pasta, you’d have a pretty good tomato-eggplant pasta dish.

Jalapeño Cheddar cornbread: Whenever I defrost and reheat chili that I had previously made — which happens a lot, since I only make chili by the vatful — I like to use that hands-off stove time to put together a cornbread to eat with. Melissa Clark’s new recipe combines the sweetness of honey, the sourness of Cheddar and the spicy bite of jalapeños for a skillet cornbread that’ll surely outshine the chili (sorry, chili). The jalapeños, by the way, can be either fresh or pickled. I’m 100 percent going pickled.

You said it

View this recipe: Samantha Seneviratne’s Instant Pot khichdi

Thanks for reading!