New Year Food Resolutions

reallyrose

I'm going to learn to cook.

I'm rubbish, I can just about come home and throw a jar of sauce through pasta, maybe a bit of cheese if I'm feeling fancy.

So I'm going to try this year! I'm going to make myself a menu plan each week for my dinners.

Tonight I'm making salmon with fried noodles and some kind of .. sauce .. thing. I'm not sure what it is really.

On a side note, is there a newbie cooking thread?

The Hill Billy

Check out the Easy Peasy Recipes thread in this forum. The Cooking Club sub-forum also has plenty of step-by-step recipes.

Best of luck!

pampootie

Zombie bump i know-sorry mods! But I thought it would be interesting to look back at this thread and see who managed to stick to their resolutions. So for me:

pampootie wrote: »

Cook more fish, at least one dinner a week. And this means extending my rubbish 4 fish dinner repetoire (tuna pasta/mackerel pasta/prawn risotto/breaded haddock). I bought this book http://www.amazon.com/Fish-Complete-Seafood-Companion/dp/1862058334/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294088737&sr=1-1 a few months ago with this very intention, and have only looked at the pictures so far

Rubbish attempt! At least one dinner a week-nowhere near. I have managed to try quite a few new recipes for fish though which I'm quite pleased by. I do cook it more often but to be honest I do find it sometimes difficult with work etc to buy and cook it during the week, and my weekends tend to involve roast meaty goodness.
Resolutions for this year is waste less, i seem to have thrown out lots of food over the past couple of months and I don't like doing it. And to stop baking huge calorific cakes when I'm bored as it inevitably leads to me eating the whole lot.

The Sweeper

HAH the irony - there's a vegetable risotto in the slow cooker right now as I type.

Wasn't a hugely successful effort in 2011 but better than nowt.

Things that feature a lot that I love:

Mushroom stroganoff. (Especially when I realised it's about $25 cheaper than when I make it with fillet steak.)

Cauliflower and potato curry with a home-made naan bread. There's a trick to aloo gobi and that's to stagger the vegetables so you have tender cauliflower and potatoes, as opposed to hard spuds and tender cauli, or soft spuds and cauli mush. I have also used the microwave on occasion.

Pumpkin risotto with fried sage leaves.

Salad is still a non-event and lettuce still comes in through the door and goes out through the bin.

Easy mac, which entered in 2010, was essentially abolished through the latter part of 2011 - a success story!

sleepyescapade

Mine is to continue progressing with my cooking/baking and experimenting with new things. Also increase intake of fruit/veg.

neuro-praxis

neuro-praxis wrote: »

This year I want my food to be more nutritionally dense. More protein, especially fish, more eggs, more nuts and seeds and oils. Less lazy carbs like white rice and sliced pan.

It's actually kinda cool to look back on this and realise that I did achieve this goal. :pac: Fish has finally become a regular part of my diet and I've learned how to cook it properly and in lots of ways. Eggs became a regular breakfast feature and nuts and seeds made their way into my salads. I still struggle to take my Udo's oil regularly, despite how good I feel when I do.

Sadly I continue to buy brown rice but then succumb to the allure of the white basmati when making a curry, and white sliced pan hasn't entirely disappeared, although it's not a regular feature. Plenty of room for improvement.

Dinkie

Dinkie wrote: »

I only have a couple.

1. To clear out my freezer and cupboards regularly. I keep forgetting what I have in there and buying the same thing (leading to three big bags of ground cumin currently in the press).

2. I travel nearly every day for work. I'm going to start keeping nuts and water in the car to stop me snacking and I'm going to start bringing my lunch with me when possible. This will hopefully mean I don't buy as many crisps in the various petrol stations.

3. I'm going to try one new meal a week. I'm going to pick a recipe and make it.... there are loads of meals I would love to try but keep putting them off (e.g. gyoza, quicke, etc). They don't have to be difficult meals. Just ones I haven't tried before.

Looking at the above, I wasn't too bad in some areas.

I am much better at using up food in the freezer and the press. Food is labelled and dated in the freezer, and every couple of months I go through presses and fridge/freezer and through out whats out of date and try and eat whats nearly expired.

My snacking was under control for ages and lost about 1.5 stone through healthy eating.. I kept rice cakes in the car, and did start bringing my lunch in. A miscarriage in Sept put paid to all that, and I put all the weight back on + some however I'm feeling sane again and as I'm back at work again tomorrow have all the ingredients for packed lunches and healthy snacks. I hope to lose 2 stone this year through healthy eating. Got engaged a couple days ago - so thats my motivation.

Finally, making a different dish each week. This has been hit and miss. I have used new ingredients like miso paste and used the cookery club on boards to make new things. Bought a slow cooker and have been trying out things in that. Next year, I'm hoping to keep this up. Maybe not every week, but every couple of weeks. Fortunately my new fiance loves cooking and loves trying out new dishes - so we have started cooking and trying things out together.

Am going to try and stick to this list again for next year.:D

Minder

Minder wrote: »

I would like to cut down on food wastage and impulse buying. I'm lucky enough to have a huge choice of markets and supermarkets to shop from, but that choice has lead an increase in wastage that I really need to cut out.

By impulse buying, I mean I will happily trot along on a Friday to my chinese supermarket where they have a fantastic fish counter. I'll buy fresh fish and shellfish. Then I'll go to the supermarket to get the main shopping, buying meat and poultry. I get home knackered, cook nothing and all the fresh meat and fish gets pushed to Saturday - result is something will go. Either I cook it all and some gets pushed in the fridge where it doesn't get used. Or I don't get to it before it spoils.

This is not a regular weekend, but it happens enough that I want to cut it out. So my main resolution is to shop more often - buying less each time. That way I can keep the sponteneity I like - cook what I fancy rather than searching for ingredients from a weekly meal planner.

Other resolutions - cook more from the cookbooks I own. So if I'm not following a recipe fully, then picking elements out of recipes - sauces etc. Cook more vegetarian meals, I have a copy of Terre a Terre - the vegetarian cookbook of the restaurant in Brighton. Brilliant book. Excellent recipes.

All in all, I want to spend less and waste less. Simple.

A mostly successful resolution, particularly in cutting out the food wastage. I stopped the Friday night shop and so managed to avoid having a weeks worth of food to process in a weekend. No more overstocked freezer and no more food spoiling in the fridge.

The vegetarian meals are still a bit hit and miss but I am cooking the books much more often.

Malari

Malari wrote: »

I only have two resolutions and they are both foodie ones!

I'm going to cook more for other people. Just invite friends over, try to make it a weekly/fortnightly thing of going to each other's houses for dinner. It doesn't have to be fancy dinner party stuff either. We can eat a casserole with a plate on our laps watching tv if we want, but it's just more fun when there's 4 or 5 for dinner, not just 2 of us

Also I am going to try more recipes. I have loads of cook books and I tend to pick the same ones all the time. I do pick and choose from the Cooking Club recipes but then fall back on the old favourites again. But I intend to try to cook new meals/sides/ingredients from the hundreds of recipes on my shelves!

Hmm, did I have people over? Yeah, I did actually, so happy with that one. BUT my Cooking Club showing was pretty awful. I think I missed out on a lot of nice recipes so I'm going to try hard again this year.

Toto Wolfcastle

Bobblehead Panda wrote: »

This year I want to cook more at the weekends. I'm always wrecked by the time Friday evening comes so I don't cook but for health reasons it has to be done.

I seem to have gone backwards this year. Since I moved in June I've cooked less at the weekends and during the week. Need to get that sorted this year.

Honey-ec

Bobblehead Panda wrote: »

I seem to have gone backwards this year. Since I moved in June I've cooked less at the weekends and during the week. Need to get that sorted this year.

Here's your sister. I'm in the process of splitting from my husband and as a result, have been back living with my parents since November. I've already posted about my mother's reluctance to let me cook, and when I get a place on my own, I'm not exactly going to be cooking up a storm for one person every evening.

I'm also mourning the loss of my garden - my herbs, my raised beds, my cold frames.

It sucks. Anyway, my food resolution is to refuse to take no for an answer when I tell my mum I'm cooking. Honest to God, she doesn't even like to cook, you'd think she'd be delighted someone else was offering... :rolleyes: