Tag Archives: new year

Luck o’ the Carrot to Ya

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carrot soupThere are all sorts of foods people eat on New Year’s Day to ensure prosperity for the coming year: greens because they look like cash, cornbread because it’s golden, black-eyed peas because they look like pennies (a stretch, I know, but whatever). What if, however, it’s not money you seek in the new year, but curly hair? When my mom was a kid, that’s how those meddling adults in her life got her to eat carrots, which was a lie so blatant that it would make me feel bad for her except that I’m pretty sure that she once told me carrots would make my eyesight better. Years later, I still have straight hair and glasses, but no lie: this carrot soup is delicious and might make a great addition to your New Year’s meal.

This is also perfect if you have a big bag full of carrots on hand, since they’re one of those vegetables that rarely get a starring role. You can adjust the spice to suit your taste, though you shouldn’t add so much that it drowns out the carrots’ own earthy sweetness. And is it just me, or do they not look a little like pennies when you chop them up to roast? Bring on the prosperous new year.

Zesty Roasted Carrot Soup Continue reading →

A New Year of Food Resolutions

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egg nog“One of my goals this week,” Jason said to me a few days ago, “is to drink a lot of eggnog.”

There’s something to be said for the attainable resolution. I know that it’s traditional to set yourself high bars this week that you will spend the next twelve months attempting to clear, but I’ve always thought New Year’s resolutions are a little silly. Not that you shouldn’t be constantly striving to be the best version of yourself you should be, but did anyone ever move mountains (or lose ten pounds, even) because of a drunken whim that passed fleetingly through her consciousness on New Year’s Eve?

That’s why my own resolutions tend toward the vague (Be more gracious!) or the pleasant. It’s far easier to count them as successful that way. This year, I will bake more bread. I will finally eat the world’s spiciest pepper before the pepper experts change their minds again about which one that is. I will pickle things. I will stop forgetting Jason’s requests to avoid cleaning his cast iron pots with soap. I will remember to make more pesto before the basil plants freeze. I will compliment people more heartily on their cooking.

Tell us your own food resolutions in the comments section. But seriously, dieting is kind of a snooze; consider following Jason’s lead.

He’s been doing a magnificent job of fulfilling that eggnog resolution, by the way.

Nogging in the New Year

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egg nog

Never mind the taste; few words are so pleasing as "nog."

After days of consuming rich holiday treats, Jason and I were pretty sure we didn’t need to add to the load. Yet there was one recipe that we hadn’t gotten a chance to try over Christmas, and we couldn’t resist giving it a whirl on New Year’s Day. The New York Times had run a recipe for Nog, the Hard Way in December, and we have a known weakness for things that are a) alcoholic and b) more difficult than they really should be. And so we put the black-eyed peas on to boil and got down to the business of nogging.

The NYT recipe is broken, rather arbitrarily, into five steps, but let me assure you, there are more than five steps. In fact, reading the thing beforehand made Jason (a wee bit hungover) threaten to wave the white flag. But once we got going, it wasn’t so hard after all, and despite a small disagreement over how fast a whisk should be moving before the action can be considered whisking, it made for an excellent tag-team cooking experience. For instance, Jason could stir in the heavy cream while I was preoccupied with cursing the fact that we only had three ice cubes left in the freezer with which to create an ice-water bath for the pan. (We ended up improvising by using an ice pack.)

ice water

Sometimes, you just have to improvise.

Jason was a tad skeptical of the raw egg factor, and we’d splurged on the freshest, most pristine eggs we could find. But regardless, it was amazing to witness how thorough of a transformation the eggs go through. After all of that whisking and beating, it seemed a chemical impossibility that they would be at all slimy or unpalatable.

Would all this intrepid nog determination turn out to be worth it? Continue reading →