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.

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