Shrimp only needs ninety seconds

Makes one full pan in about 30 minutes: dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow, or one big dinner if that is where your appetite lands today. The whole pan holds roughly 90g of protein.

Start with the shrimp. Toss them in a bowl with a teaspoon of salt and the baking soda, then put the bowl in the fridge and forget about it while you deal with the eggplant.

Cube the eggplant, toss it with a half teaspoon of salt, and let it sit in a colander for ten minutes. Blot it dry with a towel. Get a large skillet hot with three tablespoons of olive oil over medium-high heat and put the cubes in a single layer. Leave them alone for 4 minutes so one side browns hard, then toss and cook 6 to 8 minutes more, until they have collapsed and gone creamy in the middle. Onto a plate.

Wipe the pan, another spoonful of oil, back on medium heat. Garlic and pepper flakes for 30 seconds, no longer. Then the shrimp in a single layer: 90 seconds, flip, 90 seconds. They are done the moment they curl into a loose C and go opaque.

Heat off. Eggplant back in, the juice of half the lemon, the parsley, plenty of black pepper. Taste for salt before it leaves the pan.

Why this works: the salt and baking soda sitting on the raw shrimp raise the pH at the surface, which keeps the proteins from clenching as hard when they hit the heat. They hold their water instead of throwing it into the pan, and they stay snappy at the exact point where untreated shrimp turn rubbery.

The shrimp keep 2 days and are better cold than reheated, so pull the leftovers straight from the fridge over greens. The eggplant keeps 4 days and is good at room temperature on toast.

No recipe, just an order of operations, and the new-crop apples have started showing up. Grate a cold apple on the large holes of a box grater, skin and all, and stop when you hit the core. Stir it into three quarters of a cup of plain skyr with a pinch of salt and a lot of cinnamon. Break a small handful of pecans over the top with your fingers.

Grate the apple rather than chopping it. The shreds bleed juice into the skyr and loosen it into something closer to a soft porridge, which is easier to get through than a stiff spoonful. Roughly 21g of protein.

Boil six eggs at once and peel them all while they are still warm, then keep them in a covered bowl. Two of them smashed onto a rice cake with hot sauce and a lot of salt is about 12g of protein and takes as long as it takes to find the hot sauce.

Anywhere a recipe wants heavy cream, open a can of evaporated milk instead. A cup of it carries about 16g of protein against about 5g in a cup of heavy cream, it will not split in a hot pan, and in a soup or a pan sauce it thickens the same way.

Canned chicken breast in water sits near the tuna and gets walked past constantly. A three ounce serving runs about 15g of protein. Drain it hard, mash it with olive oil, lemon and cracked pepper, and it is a lunch that never involves the stove.

Iron arrives in food in two forms and they do not behave the same. The kind in meat, poultry and shellfish is absorbed readily. The kind in beans, lentils, spinach and fortified grains is harder for your body to take up, and vitamin C eaten in the same meal helps you take up more of it. That is the practical argument for squeezing lemon over a pan of greens or beans, or setting tomatoes and peppers next to them, rather than treating those two things as separate parts of dinner. It costs nothing and it needs no supplement, only a little attention to what sits next to what on the plate.

For the day this week when standing at the stove is not going to happen: quick grits cooked in milk instead of water, five minutes with a whisk, then a big handful of grated parmesan stirred in off the heat and a lot of black pepper. Soft, warm, salty, and there is real protein sitting in the bowl.