A New Year’s Day

Hanging over

On New Year’s Day I woke up feeling more than a little hungover. In addition to New Year’s Eve being one of the many holidays on which Americans, myself included, tend to over-imbibe. December 31st is also my husband’s and my wedding anniversary. We got married on the fifth anniversary of our first date and last month we celebrated our second wedding anniversary. And celebrate we did. We dined, we drank and we danced. Well I danced, and darling Marshall watched over me from his station leaning against support beam in a warehouse just off the dance floor. The combination of champagne, vodka, redbull and three hours of sweaty dancing left me feeling less than energized when I woke up at one in the afternoon on January 1st. Marshall and I spent most of what was left of the day lolling around in bed, but come nightfall, Marshall decided to take action. He was going to make something new in the kitchen. For the New Year’s Resolution.

Oh yeah, that.

There’s a great natural food store not to far from our house, so Marshall took off on his bike to get ingredients. Upon returning home, he asked if I would mind staying completely out of the kitchen until he was done. I told him I was more than happy to lay in bed and watch yet another movie on my laptop. “But seriously,” he warned. “Stay out.” So stay out I did. And a movie and a half later he said he said it was almost done. At this point my curiosity was definitely peaked. You see, Marshall is incredibly deliberate and slow-moving about many things, but especially about food related things. He is known among our family and friends, very lovingly, as “the slowest eater in the world.” As for cooking? Well, water comes to a boil at 2/3 the normal speed when Marshall is standing over the stove. I was expecting dinner to take a while, but it had been over three hours! And it was almost done? What was going on in there?

Ramekin, ramekin

And then, right as the second movie was ending I got the call to come to dinner. Set before me, covering an adorable white ramekin, was a beautiful golden crust that held unknown treasure. For years I have admired and exclaimed over what an incredible looking vessel the ramekin is. I have fondled many sizes and colors- though I have always really loved the clean classic white version best. But I’d never bought one. Because you can’t make hippie stir fry in them. Not only did Marshall get two ramekins, he explained, he bought four so we could make yummy stuff in ramekins for guests! For this New Years Resolution! That we’re going to do! That he had started making good on! And I was so excited to see the ramekins in my home, and the beautiful food in front of me that just a little tiny bit of enthusiasm for finding new things to cook, perhaps even every week, started to come over me.

All around the beautiful ramekins topped with the beautiful golden crusts were shaved, crisped brussel sprouts that Marshall recreated from our dinner the night before at Ned Ludd, a meal that we will probably talk about until we are old and gray. Everything that gets cooked at Ned Ludd gets cooked in a wood burning stove. Everything. But I digress.

Expectations be damned

Let me tell you what I expected. And I’m sorry sweetie, but I must tell the truth. I expected to pick up my fork, and poke through that beautiful crust into a doughy, tough mass and uncover a dry rice, tempeh and broccoli mixture that tasted like soy sauce and nutritional yeast. You know, hippie stir fry, but in a ramekin. But instead my fork found a flaky, crumbly buttery crust and a most succulent, tofu, pea, and carrot pie, expertly seasoned with sage and thyme and just the right amount of salt, all held together by a thick brothy-juicy sauce. And oh-so-very, very delicious.

I spent the meal alternately singing the praises of Marshall’s mad-cooking skills, and exclaiming about how cute the ramekins were. All between bites, of course. Marshall told me about the pie-crust making anxiety he experienced, and how much fun he had making the rest of the meal while he listened to podcasts. So this is the kind of thing we can do when we set ourselves to making a new meal. We can eat like this! In our home! And maybe it can even be fun! Count me in. Game on.

Vegan Tofu and Vegetable Pot Pie adapted by Emily Ho of thekitchn.com

Last year’s attitudes

A little history

I’ve been cooking for a long time.  Not necessarily with much enthusiasm of ingenuity, and not necessarily terribly consistently.  For an entire year, I pretty much subsisted on various combinations of free produce from the natural food store I worked at, duck eggs that were given to me by a local chemist/duck farmer whom I gave salad bar lettuce prep leftovers to feed his flock of 150 ducks, tortillas, cheese (sometimes but not always free), brown rice, and leftover deli food that I got from work.  Oh, and beer.  Lots of beer.  That I paid for.

Over the years I’ve made a lot of spaghetti, bean and veggie burritos, simple hippie-style stir fries, lentil soup and garden burgers.  I’ve eaten out a lot too.  Sometimes to experience new or interesting or delicious foods, because I have always loved good food, and lots of times because I didn’t want to or didn’t have time to cook.

Kitchen doldrums

Cooking became for me, as it does for many, a chore.  Pure and simple.  Sure, when a bunch of people were coming over for dinner I really did have fun making enchiladas or lasagna – my two good old standby “company’s coming” meals for as long as I can remember.  But making the same eight or ten meals over and over again is really boring.  And eating them over and over again?  My tastebuds were as bored as my hands.  And if my meal-cooking rotation was boring, my husband’s three-meal repertoire was about to put me into a coma.  And one of his menu items was hippie stir fry too!

I often told myself that recipes were for rule-followers and I didn’t want to be a rule follower.  But who am I kidding?  As rebellious a heart I may have, when it comes to action I am a total goody-two-shoes.  Always have been.  Regardless, I never followed recipes.  Or rther, I never did. Sometimes I would attempt to recreate something I’d had at a restaurant, but it would rarely turn out even close to what I was after, and that can be downright disheartening.  I have made lots and lots of dishes that pretty much tasted like cumin.  When I look back at my anti-recipe stance I think it was mostly laziness.  First you have to go get all those ingredients I don’t have.  And then you have to follow all those directions.  That require all those steps.  And all those pans.  And then all those dishes.  No wonder I made so many hippie stir fries.  One pan, two plates, whatever’s in the fridge, twenty minutes.  Bam.

And then he said…

Over Christmastime, my mother, my darling husband Marshall and I were discussing what to make for Christmas Eve dinner. None of us are particularly traditional about holiday meals (yes, I made three giant lasagnas for Thanksgiving a few weeks prior), so we were talking about salmon and sweet potatoes. Just a few days previous Marshall had taken it upon himself to look up a recipe on The Internet for sweet potatoes in an effort not to make the same old thing (We usually bake them in the toaster oven and top them with sour cream and salsa). He ended up making delightful steamed white sweet potatoes drizzled with lime juice and sprinkled with sea salt. We were both tickled pink about these sweet potatoes. With the sweet. And the savory. And the limey tang that snuck up on you oh-so-sneakily. So Marshall decided to make them for my mom. All of us were merrily (it was Christmas Eve, after all) munching on our sweet potatoes and salmon baked with grapefruit when Marshall said something along the lines of “hey sweetie, how about for a New Years resolution you and I try to cook a new food once a week for a whole year?” I must admit I was a little taken aback. Cooking is boring. And cooking new things is hard. And the kitchen is so small. And, and, and… But he looked so excited and enthusiastic (as he so often does) so I replied, “How about just as often as we can, so we don’t put too much pressure on ourselves?”

And I thought that much like most New Year’s resolutions, this idea would come and go and we would never really talk about it until it was time to make the next year’s resolutions.