Thinking about home and outside consumption separately.
For home meals, I’d like to get back to being more thoughtful / organized about buying and using ingredients. Weekly menu planning is usually very helpful towards this end, but I fall off when outside meals increase in frequency. Would be great if half these meals could be “routine” from family repertoire (combinations of veg, beans, whole grains).
I’d like to be even more mindful about protein sourcing. I buy organic / grass-fed / wild-caught as available already, but through the pandemic, we ordered directly from farms / producers / ranchers / fishermen, and while the minimum quantities didn’t used to make sense for me as a solo consumer without extensive freezer space, there are more options now.
For restaurant meals, I used to try to eat out with friends I wanted to meet only at restaurants they or I specifically wanted to eat at, but extensive post pandemic catch-ups threw that off with too many mediocre meals at easy places, so this year I’d like to wind that back. HO group meals have been a great way to try ingredients I wouldn’t order on my own, so I look forward to more of them too.
Finally, I want to document my parents’ own and family recipes in a deliberate fashion, ideally with the stories and variations that accompany them. We have some already documented on my dad’s side as my grandmother wrote them out for my youngest cousin (who won’t share, separate issue), but my dad’s are more extensive and include those plus his grandparents’, as well as favorites from his friends’ families and from various family cooks over the years. On my mom’s side, there is also fascinating built-in menu planning and seasonality from her great grandparents’ and grandparents’ eras that we are piecing together as she talks about how they ate, what they ate, and when they ate it, all in the context of a large, traditional, multigenerational, “joint” family.
Other thoughts:
- More group / social cooking in some format — whether with friends, cooking class, in the form of potlucks, or something else I haven’t thought of
- Apartment gardening (indoor or outdoor) for small amounts of things I will be able to consume and/or share — maybe a tomato plant and some herbs (I had a thriving pandemic farm, but have killed anything I have attempted to grow in my apartment before and after, lol)
