Put the sheet pan in the oven empty

Makes one full pan in about 40 minutes, most of it in the oven: dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow, or one big dinner if that is where your appetite lands today. The whole pan holds roughly 150g of protein.

Put a rimmed sheet pan on the middle rack and heat the oven to 450°F with the pan inside. When the oven says it is ready, give the pan five more minutes.

Toss the sprouts in a bowl with two tablespoons of olive oil and a big pinch of salt. Pull the hot pan out, tip the sprouts on, and turn as many as you can cut side down with tongs. They should sizzle when they land. Scatter the bacon in the gaps and roast 18 to 20 minutes, until the cut faces are deep brown and the bacon has gone crisp. While they roast, whisk the vinegar, honey and pepper flakes in the bowl the sprouts came out of.

Pull the pan and push the sprouts and bacon out to the edges. Lay the trout in the middle skin side down, brush the tops with a little oil and salt them. Switch the oven to broil and slide the pan back in for 5 to 6 minutes, until the thickest part of the fish flakes when you press it with a fork. Spoon the vinegar mixture over the sprouts and crack black pepper over everything.

Why this works: a cold sheet pan spends the first ten minutes catching up while the sprouts sit on it and steam. A pan that is already hot sears the cut faces the moment they touch it, the way a skillet would. The trout never gets flipped. The hot metal cooks it from underneath while the broiler works on the top, so a thin fillet comes off the pan in one piece.

The sprouts keep 4 days and are good at room temperature. The trout is best within 2 days. Break the leftovers into big flakes and fold them into scrambled eggs, or eat them cold over the sprouts.

No recipe, just an order of operations, for a morning that wants something cold and savory. Stir a teaspoon of prepared horseradish into two tablespoons of whipped cream cheese. Cut a few spears from an English cucumber. Lay out four ounces of thin-sliced deli roast beef a slice or two at a time, smear each with the horseradish cream, set a cucumber spear at one end and roll it up. Black pepper over the rolls, and a ripe pear cut into wedges on the side.

Ask for the roast beef sliced thin at the deli counter rather than buying the stiff prepacked kind. Thin slices roll without cracking and go soft against the cream cheese. Roughly 22g of protein.

A bag of dry-roasted soybeans from the nut aisle, sometimes sold as soy nuts, with a few dried cranberries in the same bowl. They crunch like a peanut, taste a little like toasted edamame, and carry more protein per handful than any of the nuts shelved beside them.

Anywhere a soup or pan sauce calls for water or regular stock, use bone broth from the soup aisle. It is made to set into a gel when cold, so it gives the pot body along with the protein. Read the label before you buy, because the protein per cup varies a lot from brand to brand.

In the freezer case near the shrimp, look for fully cooked mussels in their shells. Tip them into a pot with a splash of white wine or broth and a sliced clove of garlic, put the lid on, and give them five or six minutes until they are hot all the way through. Eat them out of a bowl with the liquid and a torn piece of bread to soak it up.

Brussels sprouts belong to the same family as cabbage and broccoli, and like them they carry sulfur compounds called glucosinolates. Those are behind both the bitter edge and the smell people remember from boiled sprouts, and long, wet cooking breaks them down into exactly that smell. High, dry heat goes the other direction. The cut faces brown, the natural sugars in the sprout caramelize, and that sweetness sits right on top of the bitterness. The sprouts in the store now are also milder than the ones a lot of us grew up with: starting in the 1990s, growers in the Netherlands bred varieties with fewer of the bitter compounds, which is a big part of why they started showing up on restaurant menus. Spread across a sheet pan, they also put real fiber right next to the fish.

For the day this week when the stove is not going to happen: warm a can of baked beans in the microwave, pour them over a slice of buttered toast, and grate sharp cheddar over the top while the beans are hot enough to melt it. Soft, savory and warm, with the beans and the cheese putting protein and fiber on the same plate.