As I mentioned on another thread, I don’t typically make new year resolutions anymore BUT I saw a picture of me from NYE which has me reconsidering.

I’ve gotta keep sweets out of the house. Snacks in general, but mainly sweets. Zero self control. And in general, just eat better. My wife is encouraging me to go on a semaglutide, but I know from experience that I can lose weight on my own with a reasobable amount of self-discipline, so I’d prefer not to go that route if I can avoid it. The first weeks are mentally tough but physically rewarding, so I’m looking forward to this. Approx 15% is my goal.

Congrats! I have a cousin who literally wrote the book on mayonnaise (in another country), and I felt guilty buying it for awile. But both here, and in her country, one can buy really good mayonnaise. Mine is light and airy, and I'll make it for a that's-the-sauce but it's pointless to bother when I can buy Ojai Cook, (Best Foods and Duke's are good, but not organic, etc, so not comparable to homemade).

I think I have a sort of yes to most of your questions, but more in my attitude toward cooking than resolve. My goal is more immediate: Defrost the storage freezer and fill it. I muxt make chicken stock, and then spaghetti sauce, green stock, and some actual food. I'm finally feeling better enough to cook and take on projects, so must get onto it.

I've decided to try two foods that I've never eaten before (and I'm 62), sardines and cottage cheese.

@cookebook I recommend starting with Good Culture for a better shot at liking cottage cheese. But in general, cottage cheese isn’t as scary as it looks. Sardines I can’t help you with. I’ll put it on my list of things to try by age 62.

My New Years Resolution....more salads! Maybe one a day for lunch. Use more Romaine Lettuce than Iceberg.🥬

I kind of took 2025 off with the kitchen and gardens. Had some work things come up so I was still cooking, but not much with the preserving or baking. So this year I'm going to be doing more baking again.. last night was an easy start with sour cream bisquick biscuits.

Already on it with the gardening, I have the kitchen grow setup now so I can start with microgreens again. Starting some sprout tests, working on seed lists and garden space plans. I've two fallow beds I get to start up again this spring.

I will start sharpening my knives on the regular. There was a wetstone kit under the tree for me :)

For sardines, if you're put off by the whole fish, try mashing them with lemon juice or horseradish sauce and eating the resultant paté on toast. Assuming you're talking about tinned sardines. I hope you like them. They're very cheap and very nutritious.

More vegetarian and vegan cooking. For weight loss, to protest against meat prices, and finally a realization that I’ve become a lazy cook, simply slapping meat on heat instead of learning new things.

We are planning a serious cull of dishware, cookware, utensils, and general kitchen gadgets. We will be retiring and moving within three years, so we need to figure out what's making the journey to Europe with us, and what's going to be sold or donated.

@LoneJack Zn 6a, KC

har-har. Keep us posted on the progress with that.

I resolve to plan better. Once I retired it was no more picking up Thai or a take and bake pizza and seems like all I do is cook. And clean the kitchen. Bah

I started cooking double and freezing meals, and prepping things like schnitzel and stuffed peppers. Now I need to get better about remembering what's in the freezer, lol.

I also want to divest myself of old tools and gadgets. Just because we have a basement doesn't mean it has to be full. Husband really wants me to want an air fryer, but I think I convinced him the old Galloping Gourmet Perfection Aire oven that I dug out of the back corner is the same thing.

I have resolved to cook less. Yeah, after more than 60 years of cooking for family and friends, I'm burnt out. Fortunately, my girlfriend likes to cook and there are plenty of nearby restaurants. Give me a choice of cooking or reservations, and I'm grabbing my cellphone to call.

I’m focusing on daily leafy greens - instead of a couple times a week & daily orange for vitamin C. Eating cottage cheese isn’t an issue for me though I don’t eat much of it but have it around for my dog as a treat so I add it to scrambled eggs. Sardines - I just can’t. I know they’re inexpensive & very good for us but I can’t. Horseradish is also a no for me so floral’s mashing tip is no help. My goal is to regain about 5 lbs that I unintentionally lost. I don’t much like to cook - only think about it when I’m hungry. When I do prepare something I like to make enough for a couple of dinners. I like oven dinners over cooktop made dinners. I do love to make soups - any kind & always a veggie or bean type.

Resolution resolved! Well, it was more the minions than me, but I did some and supervised the heck out of it. It's a cool and rainy day, but the (manual defrost, garage storage) freezer defrosted quite quickly, maybe a couple of hours. After moving the food to the coolers (I've learned from experience in the last 6 months that the best way to do it is to line the camping coolers with gel packs (they come with my farm deliveries)). Without any precooling, it's enough to keep everything good and frozen for many hours. After emptying and shutting off the freezer, we went out in the drizzle to send the presents to the Christmas cousins we didn't get to because of the dangerous rains. When we got back, it was nearly all clear. Another half hour and the last of it was breakable.

What I hadn't realized was that things had gotten disarranged when we had to stuff in everything from the kitchen freezer when it had the vapors. I found a few small containers of both chicken and green stock, and a large container of my friend M___'s recipe cabbage soup. I brought in that and a package of brisket so I can hunker down for the storm and not worry about meals. :) Thanks, Hobbitmom, for bringing it to the fore in my mind.

Well phooey! i just lost a post I had composed. Hit submit and proof, gone! I have had that happen way too often lately.

My first resolution has nothing to do with food. For the past several months, I have been cleaning out excess things from our kitchen and pantry. I have thrown away or donated lots of excess coffee mugs, water bottles, some cookware, lots of small kitchen tools I never used, and plastic kitchen tools that everyone was worried about. I still have 1-2 b/c I can’t find a suitable replacement. This past week I purged a lot of placemats and cloth napkins.

As for cooking, I don’t do a lot anymore. DH and I have been making an effort to lose some extra weight, and we both are where we like to be now. We just started eating less and less and now it doesn’t take much to fill us. He has lost 20 lbs and I’ve lost 15. Getting back to regular exercise after my femur surgery in ’24 and the resulting inactivity from that was key for me. It was a slow recovery. The hard part now is making sure we get enough protein. We eat pretty much what we like just much less of it, with no or very limited snacks.

I love cottage cheese. In summer especially I eat it almost every day at lunch with added cherry tomatoes, sometimes a little chopped cucumber with flakey salt on top, or with whatever fruit I have.

The top three resolutions many people choose. ...clean eating, exercise regularly, and lose weight, I have covered. I am almost a vegetarian, I hike three miles every day, and my BMI is 17 or 18, so my resolution is PURGE.

@Outside said it well. I remember clearing out my mother's house, preparing to take her to an independent housing apartment near me, and she had at least 25 Cool Whip containers. She got agitated we were pitching all of them, so we had to distract her with another issue. I don't have that problem, but as an antique collector for 40 years, I have ten rooms of stuff. Thrift stores have already gotten some nice clothing, particularly about ten pairs of my vintage jeans. I even got my husband to clean out his wardrobe.

No kitchen-related resolutions for me.

I'd like to separate out my vegetable recipes into a separate saved recipes binder specifically for vegetables and indexed by individual vegetable, but this has been on my to-do list for a few years now. Reality is it probably isn't going to get done this year, either...

Porkchop, maybe it's the binder? Many years ago, I typed up all my handwritten recipes into Word, and printed as I needed, handed over the page when asked, and saved them in a binder in the kitchen, which became two, then four. Awkward!

I found an app I liked, Mealboard. It works on iPad and phone, and on the web on the computer, making transferring, and using wherever easy. One can just copy and paste into the directions field, plus a name, and it'll show as written, or one can put all the info in all the fields, to use the app's formatting. When asked, it's easy to use the device's share function, It displays well to just use as is, especially from the tablet, and easy to print, still, as well (if one's printer doesn't hate one). My creaky old worn out iPad still updates and displays my recipes. I just keep it plugged in, in the kitchen. And one of the fields is for category, which you can customize--put a check mark on Vegetables, plus one on rutabagas and one on collard greens and one on savory pies. Whatever you want.

This is MUCH easier than printing and bindering! And you can share one recipe or the whole collection, with your bestie or kids or whomever, Mealboard, and other recipe apps, also have meal planning and scheduling, pantry inventoy, shopping lists, etc, should you care to use them. I don't. Too much tapping screens. I chose this app because, as I said, it displays fine if you just cut and paste. It does a good job importing from the web, too, if there's only one recipe on the web page. And, it's a few clicks to manually add the bits to the formatting, at any time. And easy to put the iPad in its trifold stand-cover on top of a canister to be close enough to eye level.

I'm not saying this exact system is necessarily for you, but it solved my binder problem really well, and I've been happy with it for many years. There may be a similar app, if not this one, that makes your ambition possible, and maybe even fun.

“Teach the Roomba to clean the kitchen table and counters.”

LJ, it could be coming. Our son has a roomba gadget to clean his grill.

I don’t really have any kitchen resolutions. This was in an email this morning. I think I do pretty well but definitely room for improvement.

Kitchen Items to Throw Away

I'm not a throw away person, so expected to hate C's linked page, but it's harmless. I would cry if I had to live in the depicted blank white box of a home, but to each their own. I have a friend who could never function in my quilt of a kitchen, for the opposite reason. Most of the points are to toss broken and yucky old junk, and I have no issue with that. The one that might bother me is the old only does one thing canard, and she wisely uses a modifier to leave it to the reader to determine its usefulness. Clearly, her head is not nearly as empty and blank as her depicted kitchen on photo day, and she tries to give actionable why's to each of her categories, like could accumulate bacteria, to make more of the categories than the simple version, which is throw away junk.

While I was so immobile, a lot of stuff accumulated all over, not just in my kitchen. It's not for New Year's, nor even a resolution, per se, but organizing the dropped in place (and refusing to let the minions "help"), then reorganizing the kitchen cabinets, is on the to-do list. Poor minions. ;) My kitchen will never be an empty blank box, like the one in the article, but I do hope for everything in its place and nothing stuck any old anywhere there was space. With the storage freezer defrosted and ready, I can also make the stock, etc., and beat back the glut of containers! (Cue noisemakers and confetti...)

"I'm not saying this exact system is necessarily for you, but it solved my binder problem really well, and I've been happy with it for many years. There may be a similar app, if not this one, that makes your ambition possible, and maybe even fun."

I have zero interest in using electronics for recipe-keeping, I like paper, and I like to use cookbooks.

The problem isn't so much my binder, it's that I have so many vegetable recipes that I have to fish through the vegetable section in the binder to find the one I want. I could re-arrange them in alphabetical order by vegetable, but then when I put a new card in the binder I'd have to shuffle everything down/over. I want a separate binder indexed out by vegetable -- flip to the carrots tab and viola! carrots recipes.

If I understand what pillog described, I have an approach that gives a similar result but without using an app or program.

For recipes I come across online (like from Serious Eats, or NY Times), I click on the icon to print the recipe but then print it not on paper but to a PDF file. I use the name of the recipe as the name of the file. For recipes I come upon that I can't immediately handle this way, like some of the recipes people here have shared, I take a photo of it, email it to myself, and then download it to the folder and rename it with the same system.

The folder is on PCs in two different homes and also in Google Drive (for access anywhere using any device). Drive is also useful for easy sharing by sending the intended recipient a link to the recipe file.

It would probably take me less than a hour to rearrange recipes into folder by main ingredient type. No need, I can easily find what I want by looking at the list of folder contents. I don't have hundreds of recipes I want to access, certainly there are fewer than 100. But my approach could handle an unlimited number.

Sometimes my wife wants the recipe "on paper" when using one - printing one or a few sheets is easy and then discarding it after use keeps down the clutter.

I get that, Porkchop! It took drowning in paper to start with the app, and that was the merest dip of the toe. My initial typing, to a system similar to EJF's above, albeit keeping the printouts, was to preserve recipes scrawled on notepads, envelopes and other random bits of paper.

Since you mentioned "cards" I'm guessing it's not basic printer paper. If so, how about a fast stopgap? Because you have all the recipes in one place, you could add color coded (carrot, broccoli, etc.) tabs, or Post-it strips, to each one so you can do a version of the quick finds in an hour. Then you could copy over each recipe as you use it, for the new sorted binder. For the doing the whole second binder, quickie version instead, you could xerox the recipes on light card stock, and cut them to fit the binder if necessary. That's the three hour solution. Again, you can do the cards the "right" way as you use the recipes. One is so much easier to do than a hundred! Long version, if the quickies don't interest you, set a goal for each week, like copy five.

All I'm saying, really, is that you sound so much like you really want this to be done, and so overwhelmed by the task, that broadening the potential processes, and/or finding strategies to lessen the overwhelmedness, can get your goal achieved, painlessly. Happy New Year!

Like plllog, I would not like that white and empty kitchen, but to each their own. I already throw away damaged or rusty kitchen utensils and pans as they become damaged and do the same with chipped or cracked dishes. I already cleaned out the coffee mugs a couple of years ago, along with the water bottles and travel mugs, so that's done too. I do have one shelf of Christmas items out in the garage that need to be thrown away or taken to Goodwill, they are the "outdoor" ornaments and frankly, out here in the sticks there's no one to see them so I don't put them up. (shrug)

I seldom make New Year's resolutions, I just decide at random times that I need to make changes and do that. Since my adventure at the Heart Center I've been trying to cut down the salt and fat, lose some weight, eat more greens and salads and just generally cook in a more healthy manner. I started in November and only the salt thing is giving me issues. A lot of people told me that after a couple of months I wouldn't miss the salt and things would even start tasting too salty. They were wrong.

I'm trying to keep an open mind and Cardiac Rehab has a very young nutritionist that obviously does not cook on a regular basis. She made and passed out samples of something she called hummus. It was sodium free canned chickpeas, garlic, lemon juice, chopped fresh parsley, brown mustard and vegetable broth. It was not hummus, and not very good. All 11 of us there tasted it. Once. We then promptly ate the celery and cucumber sticks. Next week it's "Salsa" chicken, which is raw chopped tomatoes, onions and jalapeno over broiled chicken breast. I think I'm on my own LOL.

Annie

"All I'm saying, really, is that you sound so much like you really want this to be done, and so overwhelmed by the task..."

No, not overwhelmed. Just not really very motivated, haven't felt like doing it. When I get to the point where it's really bugging me, then I'll get moving on it. And grumble to myself because it should have already been done. LOL!.

“…I would not like that white and empty kitchen…”

I agree. The link shows her beach house kitchen she clearly prefers that way. Interesting since her home kitchen’s quite different. Still white but much more ”farm house” and not empty.

Having a machine searchable recipe file removes the problem of recipes which feature more than one main ingredient. My old binder has subject sections but where do I put a sweet potato dhal recipe? Under sweet potato or under pulses? Elmer's system makes it easy to find. I now keep the few new recipes I intend to use again digitally.

Renovations and redecorating also help with decluttering. When our kitchen was remodelled we got rid of every piece of crockery that wasn't white and all the cutlery which didn't match. Same with books. All the duplicates and stuff we'd never read again went. Regarding clothes we have very little storage and consequently very few clothes. We buy new when something is worn out or too outdated even for us.

As for resolutions, I don't bother. If something needs changing, the depths of winter gloom doesn't seem the best time to try.