new year's resolutions

The new year is beginning! How many of us are contemplating what we want to do differently in 2013? If you are the primary cook for your household, or one of the primary cooks, you may be looking for ways to cook more at home. I don’t know about you, but while I am the primary cook, cooking is not primarily what I do – I  have to fit in all my other roles (mother, wife, daughter, friend, worker, etc.) during the day, too. One tool that can make it easier to cook at home is knowing ahead of time what you are cooking. Planning out the meals for the week definitely helps me when 5:30 rolls around and the family starts milling around looking hungry.   

It's a good thing Minnesota is (typically) such a cold and snowy place as we turn the calendar page to a new year, because for the second year in a row, my New Year's resolution has involved soup. Here's a tip apropos of resolutions, people: Don't bite off more than you can chew, or slurp. Last year, I resolved to figure out a way to make a delicious vegetable soup that satisfied my hungry, winter (read: carnivorous) self and I did it! It pays to make super attainable resolutions. The vegetable stock and the soup itself are recipes I go back to time and time again, and each time I do, I feel warm, nourished, happy and yes, a wee bit virtuous. This year, as I was thinking of things in my life I wanted to change in 2012, I somehow fell right back into a pot of soup.

In preparation for this New Year's blog post, I went back and read what I wrote last year at this time. (If you haven't read it yet, Shari's terrific, extensive 2010 good food recap from last week is well worth your time.) I'm the kind of guy who holds himself accountable, and I'm not about to make a bunch of new resolutions without seeing how I did on the old ones. Here are last year's New Year's resolutions, along my my own view on how we did: