New Year’s Resolution… A Fun One

I hate New Year’s resolutions. In a few days, the gym will be packed whenever I have to use the treadmill because I can’t walk outside for some reason or another. Of course, by February, it won’t be packed anymore. And that’s why I hate New Year’s resolutions. Most of them are too hard to keep. They’re almost always something we don’t want to do but think we should.

A few days ago, a friend of mine posted the following screengrab from social media:

every time i ask people if they do any new years resolutions its all oooo i dont like making them bc i fail or ohhhhh no i couldnt keep up with that and then when they ask me and i tell them about Pasta Quest (i am eating as many different pasta shapes as possible in the space of a year or when i did Fruit Adventures (every time i saw a fruit i had never eaten before id get one and eat it and read the wikipedia article about it) theyre like hang on i forgot you can make Fun Ones i want a fun one

I love the idea of having a fun New Year’s resolution. I’m not sure about Pasta Quest, but I think it could be fun for me to cook one new dish each week to try some new recipes, practice my cooking skills, and use my cookbook collection.

I didn’t see any reason to wait until the new year officially starts in a few days, so I started tonight.Milk Street: Tuesday Nights Mediterranean: 125 Simple Weeknight Recipes from the World's Healthiest Cuisine

I love Milk Street for taking me outside my comfort zone; their dishes are always much more exotic than I’d usually cook. I bought this cookbook a couple of months ago to add to my collection. I decided to find something in the cookbook to try for dinner tonight and wound up picking the Sumac-Spiced Chicken Cutlets with Tomato-Onion Salad, mainly because I knew I already had all the spices and pomegranate molasses (thanks to Helen Rennie). It’s a secret ingredient in a lot of my sauces now) and would only need to pick up the chicken and produce from the grocery store. I liked it so much that I will definitely add it to my repertoire. I was recently watching Helen Rennie’s YouTube channel, and she has a video for Salmorejo. Helen doesn’t live very far from me, so when she has tips about shopping, I find them more helpful than her viewers who live farther away might. She mentioned in this video that Campari tomatoes are pretty good year-round in New England, so I bought those. In-season summer tomatoes would probably be heavenly in this dish. I found it pretty easy to make as well. I can’t print the recipe here for copyright reasons, but I highly recommend anything by Milk Street, so check out the book. I was really pleased with the results. I rarely take pictures of meals I cook (baked goods are another matter), but I had to take a picture of this meal. It was so pretty.

Sumac-Spiced Chicken Cutlets with Tomato-Onion Salad

This is a New Year’s resolution I can get behind.

Sunday Salon: Resolutions

A Ride in the SnowJust like everybody else, I am making a few resolutions as the new year begins. However, making resolutions is not typical for me. I usually ignore the passage of a new year, at least in terms of turning over a new leaf. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a teacher or not, but I always felt like the real new year turned when a new school year started. For some reason, I don’t know why, this year feels different. I actually find myself feeling like it is the start of the new year, and for the first time in years, that didn’t feel like a sad thing to me. New Year’s Eve usually makes me quite sad, and this year, while I can’t say I was excited or anything, I felt pretty content. As a result, I started thinking about the things I really want to do better or do more of in the coming year.

No Excuses Art Journaling: Making Time for Creativity I have the usual resolutions regarding tackling organization, etc., but in terms of reading, I want to try to be much more active in reading and talking about my reading here. I have had a hard time making myself blog for the last couple of years, but I do enjoy it, particularly book blogging, and I have missed it.

I also want to do better with journaling, and to that end, I picked up No Excuses Art Journaling: Making Time for Creativity. It looks like a fun way to try a new creative outlet. One of the things I have enjoyed about making soap is the creativity. The soap is like a work of art. No two cut bars are the same, and no two batches of soap are the same. Art journaling seems like a fun way to be creative when I’m stuck. One of the things I’ve learned about making soap over the last year is that it can’t be my only creative outlet, or I wind up making too much of it. By the way, if any takers want to try out my soap, let me know. If you want to check out my soap on Etsy, try here.

So, do you have any resolutions?

The Sunday SalonA Ride in the Snow by DaveLawler