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)
@mig - What type of edible flower did you attempt? I had good success growing nasturtiums in a back-deck planter, and since both the flower and the leaves/stems are edible we had fun with colorful additions to basic salads.
As I noted over on Weekly Menu Planning – my goal is to use what I have in the freezer (especially) and pantry.
I’ve got dinner menu plans thru mid-February mapped out and will report progress over on WMP. So far ( day 2) I’m on-plan for using proteins from my overstocked freezer. But yesterday I grocery-shopped to get farro for Monday’s recipe, a sweet potato needed for tonight’s recipe and cream & fresh spinach for Wednesday’s recipe . And somehow expanded to include sandwich deli-meat, even though it shouldn’t be needed with all the dinner leftovers available to reheat for lunches.
When I turn my focus on canned/dried goods in the pantry, the cookbook I just got by Donna Hays should come in handy – Off the Shelf, Cooking from the Pantry.
In addition to putting less food in the landfill, I want to try recipes I can adjust to just two servings. I find it frustrating trying to cook new recipes that might not get eaten.
Two people is hard, but what about 2 servings? It’s more like one people and one picky people. I want to be able to try things that the other “people” probably won’t try.
I live with oddly picky people and I have had some success making my “adventurous” recipes for lunch (since DS12 usually takes leftovers to school or buys lunch, and DH makes his own lunches). This has worked for random curries, soups, and salads depending on the season.
Continue with our incredibly helpful Weekly Menu Planning threads.
Continue with a minimum of one vegetarian and one seafood dinner each week.
Continue baking the majority of my breakfasts. It’s been a very good way to scratch the dessert itch without eating dessert.
Try more new recipes. I used to have the goal of one new recipe per week, but I always got bogged down during the busiest parts of my teaching schedule. So, just “more” is the goal.
Really enjoying seeing what everyone is doing here! Good luck!
^^^ This. DH and I typically are on the same boat (my cooking) for the vast majority of our meals. When the occasion arises, however, that our cravings diverge, we fend for ourselves for breakfasts and/or lunches and/or snacks. It works well.
That too. Manchild has a pretty sophisticated palate but is picky about certain things. Those are the things I make when he’s working late or out with friends.
It goes the other way too. When my son hit puberty he went from eating like a tiny bird to this creature that I swore was going to stroll into the kitchen, pick up the entire fridge, empty it into his mouth and look around for more. I went from basically cooking for 2-1/2 to cooking for 5 almost overnight. For about 3 weeks he’d have a sandwich or two for dessert because he ate all of his dinner and all that would have gone to work for lunch the next day and was still ravenous. I eventually caught up but it took longer than I thought it would.
Reminds me of my cousins who played sports in high school. One day my aunt had put a dozen oranges in her fruit bowl and a cousin came home and ate all those oranges!
All of those sound great for setting 2023 goals or resolutions! I aim to improve my programming skills and make an effort to master making a few dishes from different countries. Maybe I’ll try my hand at cooking a new soup recipe or make a Japanese-style sushi.
