Recipes! Cobb Salad; Savory Oatmeal With Shiitake ‘Bacon,’ Egg and Pesto; Roman-Style Gnocchi

What to cook during the week ahead, from Post Food editors.

Time is a funny thing. There are moments you want to stretch out as long as possible. There are others when you want to pack as much as you can into every second, until it feels like time is folding into itself.

That relentless rush, rush, rush is where I most often find myself these days, with nearly every minute of my day accounted for by the demands of work, parenting and home. Of course, that includes cooking. Lots of cooking.

Because so many of you find yourselves in the same position, we often hear from readers asking how they can be faster in the kitchen, especially when it takes them longer to make a recipe than they expected or were told it would. As I mentioned in my piece sharing my top seven tips for faster, more efficient cooking — part of The Post's January Reset project — one of the keys is to practice, practice, practice.

Have a tip for how you make cooking faster? Send me an email and I'll share some of my favorites in next week's newsletter.

That certainly applies to using a knife. As the culmination of a week of related content in her Eat Voraciously newsletter, Daniela Galarza took us through essential knife skills, complete with tips and recipes to help you master slicing, mincing, julienning and more. Whether you're confident with a knife or still working on getting better, you're definitely going to want to make Cobb Salad. The famous recipe from the Hollywood Brown Derby calls for plenty of chopping as you put together an irresistible mix of bacon, avocado, egg, chicken, lettuce, tomato and blue cheese.

Not to sound cheeky, but sometimes the secret to cooking faster is … to cook things that don't take long to make! That's one of several reasons I can't wait to add Ellie Krieger's Savory Oatmeal With Shiitake 'Bacon,' Egg and Pesto to my rotation. Oats take very little time to prepare, and while you're doing that, you can get some smoky mushrooms and fried eggs going in a skillet. Add a bit of prepared pesto — store-bought or homemade — and in 25 minutes, you'll be digging into a satisfying breakfast for dinner.

In other scenarios, you can shave time off a recipe without cutting corners. That's the strategy in the Roman-Style Gnocchi that Joe Yonan shared in his Weeknight Vegetarian column. You make a cheesy semolina porridge, spread it in a flat layer, cut, arrange in a pan with more cheese and butter and then bake. Cutting the semolina (no potatoes here!) into rounds makes for an eye-catching presentation, but as Joe says, you can speed things up by simply using a knife to create squares. The more you cook, the more you'll get a feel for what steps are really important and what things are negotiable.

The "do I really have to do this?" question comes up often in the live weekly chat I host with Aaron Hutcherson, and we're always happy to answer it, as well as any other inquiries you have about cooking. You can submit your questions now, but be sure to join us Wednesday at noon Eastern.

See you back here next week. Happy cooking!