From Recipes

[Photographs: Chichi Wang]

The memorable meals in our lives take place in the presence of friends and family. Dishes we cook for those we love leave indelible impressions in our minds, like culinary timestamps. Even so, I eat some of my best meals when I'm alone in the kitchen, cooking something I've honed obsessively.

Nights spent in solitude demand a different approach. Cooking can take as little as half an hour or longer than two, but the pace is never hurried. Only one vessel is used so there's less to clean afterward. Ingredients are high in quality, but extravagant purchases seem beside the point. Every cook has such a dish: a meal that can be composed of disparate items, all gathered together to satisfy a singular palate. For me this dish is Korean soondubu jjigae, a tiny cauldron of bubbling, spicy, silken tofu.

Roughly translating to "soft tofu stew," a pot of soondubu is possibly the silkiest tofu dish you will ever cook. A classic Korean tofu dish with countless variations, no two pots of soondubu are ever the same. Usually, th