New Year Resolution

A holiday gift to myself was Gabrielle Hamilton’s, Prune. I enjoyed her memoir of a few years back and looked forward to this recipe book after it popped up on a few food sites rounding up year-end best-of lists. Candidly, I’m not sure I’ll do many of the recipes, but I really like the conceit of the book. It’s written as notes to kitchen staff. There are tips on how to plate, what to substitute where and when, and what to set aside for other uses, other meals. How not to waste. The business of running a restaurant.

They’re good tips, and it’s made me look at what goes to waste in our kitchen. So I’ve been making it a point to set aside the tops of celery, the ends of things, the stems of mushrooms, the shells of shrimp. These are stored in various bags in the freezer and come in handy for homemade stocks. It’s a small step.

Another read, Twelve Recipes, by Cal Peternell, is hitting my sweet spot even more than “Prune” did. Effortlessly written, it’s just a pleasure to read. The idea stems out of Peternell setting out the kitchen basics for a son who’d left home. Each chapter has one basic recipe, and then several variations on the theme. He describes the goal, “if you could pare it down and learn just twelve recipes, one from each of the chapters, […] you’d be pretty set. Another dozen would broaden your options, and with each added dozen, your perception of cooking itself would broaden…”

This idea of small, incremental steps that tip towards change, slowly, and eventually change they way you interact with a thing, this is my sweet spot. It’s what I’m after when I take up anything, and what I hope a good book will do for me.

2015 started off rocky, one cold after another, deep freezes and bad sleeps. The spirit of “Twelve Recipes” is to eat simply and well, and to wrestle one thing down to size and grow it from there. The idea is to take the activity and leverage an examined approach into different areas of life. Cooking is already relaxation for us, so the lesson needn’t be that. We’re not afraid to try new things or switch the direction of a meal midway. But there’s been a lot of that going on, which breeds a little too much focus on just one meal or one day at a time.

Our little step, our resolution, if you will, will be to plan the week forward more carefully. To be more aware of waste. Through this activity, to add more structure to the pace of a busy life. To make ourselves healthier and more budget-minded through approaching stuff in a more conscious way.

Challenge accepted.