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December 31, 2005
Happy New Year!!
I did successfully follow through on a New Year's resolution once: I went vegetarian three years ago and stuck it out for seven months. Either the bangers and mash at Chip Shop or my cousin Ruth's stewed chicken threw me off the wagon -- I can't remember which. I still try to eat meat only occasionally, but over the holidays I have been eating meat as if I were trying to make up the lost time, which is bad.
I'm off to celebrate in a bit and I don't seem to have an idea for a resolution at all at the moment. Spend less? Go back to school? Learn how to make a souflee? Actually, the souflee idea doesn't sound half bad, since there's a great bleu cheese souflee recipe in the Barefoot in Paris cookbook. It's also not as lofty and impossible as the "spend less" resolution. It's a little pathetic for a resolution, though.
If I'm feeling ambitious, I could add this: Do not eat out for one month. If I can get D to go in on this one with me (I think he got the idea in my head in the first place), we'll have a fighting chance. It would force us to hone our cooking skills (much needed), and the side effect would be a little saved money. I'm highly doubtful of success, though. I'm a little scared of a month without sushi or Red Hot chinese take-out or brunch. That's a very non-New York thing to do. And what if I have a bad day and have a killer craving for the squash soup at Souen?
And which month would it be? Would it include lunch? Derek buys lunch at the Sony commisary every day, so that might not work for him. We could just focus on dinner. I suppose we'd have to invite people over if we wanted to be social, which is not something we're terribly skilled at (it involves cleaning the apartment). Still, it would be a worthy experiment. I say we try for March. There are no birthdays that I can think of then.
I'm betting we don't last a week.
Posted by csageday at December 31, 2005 08:32 PM
Comments
Not eatting out sounds like it would be a good idea if you could just figure out how to make it work. Would someone else paying the bill count as cheating?
Posted by: Molly at January 1, 2006 01:03 AM
I think not eating out is a good idea... but maybe if your goal is to cook, make that your primary focus? (You've got great restaurants there, too--why give that up?:) Unsolicited advice, I know--but I have thought of doing the same thing (and failed!)
A friend lent me James Beard's "Theory and Practice of Good Cooking" several months ago, which I'm just sitting down to read now. Hopefully some know-how will help us start to cook more.
Posted by: ck at January 2, 2006 01:26 PM
Molly -- you're right, we need to figure out a better plan.
ck: Good point. Cooking at home more could be a more general New Year's resolution, although those don't tend to stick as well. I need structure (I need to feel like I'm proving that I can actually accomplish something).
I love the idea of the Julia/Julie (or whatever it was) project -- where a woman cooked every recipe in the Julia Childs cookbook (and blogged about it). Maybe I could try something a little less daunting. I have five million cookbooks -- there must be something in there we can use -- or use as a starting point.
Posted by: Cindy at January 2, 2006 10:27 PM
Hey, I think that's a great idea, so I've started a food blog. It's arbitrarymarks-food.blogspot.com, but you can get there from my main page.
Thanks for the inspiration! :)
Posted by: ck at January 3, 2006 08:40 PM