It's still January, still fair to be making resolutions. So here are mine:
1. Make pasta from scratch. I'll have 2 good step-by-step blog posts to guide me, here and here.
2. Finally finish renovating the kitchen. I want to have all my spices in one place again!
3. Try making dishes from a new-to-me ethnic cuisine. Thai? Moroccan? or maybe explore my own culinary roots--Slovak/Eastern European. (I also have Scottish roots, but I'm not sure I want to make a haggis.)
4. Make pierogies from scratch (my ethnic roots!).
5. Utilize my cookbook collection more. I have a tendency to covet and collect and then just hoard things--so maybe I ought to make a recipe a week from one or another of them.
6. Make an effort to shop, cook, and eat more adventurously. Find out what galangal is. Buy a quince or some kumquats. Make some pickled turnips!
7. Collect the family recipes, which is something I've been meaning to do for a long time and haven't.
8. Make a kitchen inventory: do I really want to do this? or is it just a fantasy, like the one where all my books are alphabetized and ordered by genre and subject?
9. Stop eating things I don't like, or don't like much, and eat only things I love. No more of those muffins from Starbucks. No more processed cheese or stale doughnuts at work functions. (Make my own doughnuts! if I make pompkushki, it will be more of the ethnic roots thing.)
For some other posts on food-related resolutions and plans, see Food and Thoughts and Hooked on Heat; and for a great retrospective list of her favorite 2006 recipes, see La Tartine Gourmande.
5 comments:
I was just thinking I should make one new thing a week. I so easily fall into a cooking rut.
Galangal is Thai ginger and Thai recipes often say I should use it, but that I can substitute regular ginger but it won't be as good.
We found it today at a huge Asian grocery here in Austin. I've been looking for two years. Next week I'll let you know if it was worth looking for. (I can't help thinking that after looking so long it can't possibly live up to the anticipation.)
I'd recommend investigating Scottish cooking. There's a whole wealth more to it than haggis. (Much as I love haggis, I wouldn't want to make one from scratch). Check out Sue Lawrence's and Nick Nairn's books.
The Cooking Rut: a poem?
MMcH: I knew it was sort of gingerish, but not that it was Thai. Must have a galangal hunt.
denzylle: thanks for the Scottish sources. I've only had haggis once, when I was 13, and probably shouldn't pronounce on it at all.
I have some pasta-making equipment that JD used to use but he's way over that enthusiasm. I'm sure he'd give it to you. It's so easy for me to buy great fresh pasta at the farmers market that I'm not even tempted to make my own.
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