In a few days, Jennie and I will both be going home for the holidays. We plan to continue posting from our respective families’ kitchens, but we won’t be reunited until after the New Year, so we’re thinking about our New Year’s resolutions a couple weeks early.
First on the agenda. Lose the butter weight!! We know that everyone resolves to lose weight and that they never succeed. But we really believe there are extenuating circumstances in our case that give us hope for the new year. Mainly, I mean the Pioneer Woman challenge is complete. That means less butter, less heavy cream, leaner meats and more leafy greens in our future. It also means reasonable portion sizes since we can go back to cooking for 2-4 people, instead of 8-10. We. Are. So. Excited.
Also, Jennie’s real-life sorella is getting married next year, and the sisters have challenged each other to a biggest loser competition for the months leading up to the wedding. By proxy, this means I will also be involved in some slim-down efforts.
We’re not asking for miracles, but since we happen to know that we consumed 9.25 pounds of butter for the PW recipes alone last year, we’d like to aim to lose at least that much by the time 2011 is over. Reasonable, n’est pas?
Second resolution. We are still collecting your votes for our 2011 cooking challenge, but we have already gone through our comments and notice that a fair number of you would like us to cook seasonally and locally in 2011. We think that’s a great idea!! Conveniently, all three challenges on the table would allow us to pursue such a goal. David Tanis’ cookbook The Heart of the Artichoke provides seasonal menus, as does Real Simple magazine. And if you challenge us to create our own recipes, buying local and cooking meals that are in-season will be our focus.
Third resolution. Make our own recipes. We’re challenging ourselves to do this, even if you don’t vote for this option as “The 2011 Challenge.” We’ve proven to ourselves that we can follow directions, and there will always be more to learn and more recipes to try, but we want to start investigating our own tastes more. 90% of our at-home cooking is completely made up and we’re big fans of what we create on the fly, so it will be a fun experiment to start keeping track of those creations and work to perfect them.
Don’t forget to vote for next year’s cooking challenge, but first tell us: what are YOUR cooking resolutions for 2011?
[addtoany] Yum