Resolutions

I don't really believe in new years resolutions. But, giving in to the romance of improving myself this coming year, I do have a few things I'd like to work on in '09:

New things:

- Stuffed pasta: The concept of making stuffed pasta is pretty simple. Right? Make pasta. Make filling. Combine. Seal with a pretty design. So I'd like to make stuffed pasta at least a couple times and hopefully become comfortable with it enough so that it's something I could do somewhat regularly, even if I don't.

- Bread: Still haven't made a loaf of bread. I had planned to attempt it over the holiday, but all the recipes I was looking at (King Arthur's cookbook) required at least a 12 hour rising time. Since I just picked up Baking with Dorie, hopefully there are other faster recipes in there.

- Indian curries: I'd like to make curry a couple times at home. Finding recipes doesn't appear to be as easy as I thought but maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.

Gear:

- Range/oven: I really really really need a new range/oven combo. Our oven is kind of crappy and takes forever to heat up. The broiler is at the bottom making broiling very difficult. I won't get something stupendous, just something better. With a better broiler. And more BTU output.

- All-clad: I'd like to start buying some All-Clad pieces, probably starting with a stockpot. My main two stockpots (8qt and 12qt) are mysteriously having problems with things sticking. The newer of the two pots has never been able to handle anything thicker than a broth and the older suffered greatly with the last batch of gumbo. However, that gumbo sticks to everything so maybe it's wrong to blame the pot. In any case, All-Clad is not cheap and I don't have a great home for new pieces so I'm going to hold off for at least the time being.

Community support:

- CSAs: It would be pretty groovy to join a CSA and get a delivery of local, naturally grown (antibiotic/pesticide free) produce.

- Meat: We're relatively close to a lot of places that do naturally raised Berkshire pork and grass-fed beef. I've been considering getting a 1/4 cow or 1/2 pig for a while. There is at least one meat CSA option that I've read about, though naturally, the drop off points seem rather far away and difficult to arrange. I wonder if it is really as difficult as I feel it will be or if I'm just damn lazy.

Restaurants:

We've recently been finding a lot more places that we really like, either closer to home than we expected (Mediterranean Grill) or reputed to be good that we hadn't really tried (Taka and Antica Posta). I'd like to continue this trend and try some on our list, including:
- Phnom Penh: Cambodian, reportedly very authentic, Tucker corridor
- Cuerno: Spanish tapas, wonderful paellas, suckling pig!