You Are What You Eat: Plan for 2021 and January 1 through January 10
Well, here begins the third year of the You Are What You Eat series where I talk about food. I'm going to do a brief recap of what's happened in years past, so if you're just here for the new recipes scroll down past the recaps!
In 2019 I talked about every single meal I made, resulting in this final stat block:
Overall Totals 2019 (less January 1)
Days Covered: 364
Meals / Dishes Cooked: 219 / 290
New Recipes: 123
Leftover Nights: 16
Eating Out / Take Out Meals: 182
Eating Out Drinks/Dessert Only: 65
New To Me Restaurants: 108
Repeated Restaurants in 2019: 68
Parties / Friends / Family Cooked: 35
Repeated Recipes: 47
In 2020 I started out focusing on different numbers, and the pandemic quickly made it mostly about the new recipes I cooked.
Restaurant Stats
Just Me and M, or Just Me (non-concert, non-ballgame, non-travel): 11 (+0)
-- Twice in a Week Resolution Breaker: 1 (+0)
With Friends/Family (non-concert, non-ballgame): 7 (+0)
Concert/Ball-game drinks: 5 (+0)
Travel: 15 (+0)
People over for food: 3 (+0)
Longest Streak of no restaurant - 299 days and counting.
Longest Streak for no takeout - 130 days and counting.
New Recipes for the Year: 155
Both of these followed an older effort from 2015 that was focused only on eating out.
Final Stats
Days elapsed: 365
Times Eating Out: 313
Beer/alcohol only: 34 (11%)
Ice Cream only: 24 (8%)
Chains: 61 (includes Cleveland chains like Aladdins, Winking Lizard and Mitchells) (19%)
Work-Related: 22 (7%)
Gaming Night: 9 (3%)
Ultimate: 5 (2%)
Travel: 157 (50%) [includes above categories as appropriate]
Europe: 91 (29%) [includes above categories as appropriate]
Going forward for 2021, I'm only go focus on two things:
- I'm morbidly curious about how long my currently only ongoing streaks of "not eating in a restaurant" and "not getting takeout" continue, so I'll track those until they end.
- People have told me they genuinely enjoy reading about new recipes, so I'm going to keep doing that. If I'm going to keep doing that, I might as well track the number of new recipes I make.
With that said, here we go for 2021:
Longest Streak of no restaurant - 309 days and counting.
Longest Streak for no takeout - 140 days and counting.
New Recipes for the Year: 6
- The Weight Watchers Essential Freestyle Cookbook gave us Cornmeal-spice Crusted Tilapia. There are a lot of ways to make breaded fish (or breaded chicken for that matter), and while this one didn't break any new ground, the spice combination was very tasty and it was easy to make, so I'm sure we'll come back to it.
- For the second increment in a row we went to the Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream Desserts. This time we made the Graham Cracker Ice Cream, but instead of doing the graham crackers we did the animal cracker variant. The end result was pretty similar to the Sweet Cream Ice Cream we made last week. It was a tiny bit heavier because of the dissolved animal cracker crumbs, but I'm not honestly sure that I could have told the difference in a blind taste test. In other words, it was still very good but I'm not sure I'd bother making it again given that it has a bunch of extra steps over the prior recipe.
The remaining four new recipes were all from the December 2020 Eating Well.
- The Creamed Brussels Sprouts had a few extra steps like pan frying shallots tossed in flour for a topping because it's supposed to be for a holiday meal, but given how easy it is to steam Brussels Sprouts in the pressure cooker it was still pretty easy to make. M really liked the sauce. It's a good side for using up extra milk or cream.
- It never hurts to have more ways to make salmon. The Pan-Roasted Sesame Salmon has a nice thick sauce made up of hoisin sauce, mirin, honey, sesame oil and soy sauce, plus assorted spices. We liked it and it's easy.
- Last night we made the Creamy Mustard Chicken Thighs. We both liked the sauce, but I found the clean up associated with pan frying the thighs was more work than the sauce was worth. I guess maybe I could air fry them or something. In any event, I served it over arugula and beets, and realized after I did so that this recipe really needs to over some starches.
- I had never made a cheesecake before, but M likes cheesecake and got me a springform pan for Hanukkah. The best cheesecake every was made by Mrs. Silverman from our synagogue back home, but her granddaughter tells me that the recipe has been lost to the sands of time, which is a poetic way of saying "she never liked giving out her recipes". My friend Elise gave me her family's cheesecake recipe, but it looked very complicated for a first effort, so I turned to the Pumpkin Swirl Cheesecake. The only real challenge I had was that the springform pan is supposed to be put inside a roasting pan so you can pour boiling water around it. Unfortunately, I didn't have a pan that was quite big enough to contain the springform pan. Instead, I put the springform pan at an angle and rotated it 90 degrees every 20 minutes or so during baking. I'm pleased to report that you could not tell the difference when the cake was done. We both greatly enjoyed it. I will certainly branch out to other cheesecake recipes, but this was a credible first attempt.
In 2019 I talked about every single meal I made, resulting in this final stat block:
Overall Totals 2019 (less January 1)
Days Covered: 364
Meals / Dishes Cooked: 219 / 290
New Recipes: 123
Leftover Nights: 16
Eating Out / Take Out Meals: 182
Eating Out Drinks/Dessert Only: 65
New To Me Restaurants: 108
Repeated Restaurants in 2019: 68
Parties / Friends / Family Cooked: 35
Repeated Recipes: 47
In 2020 I started out focusing on different numbers, and the pandemic quickly made it mostly about the new recipes I cooked.
Restaurant Stats
Just Me and M, or Just Me (non-concert, non-ballgame, non-travel): 11 (+0)
-- Twice in a Week Resolution Breaker: 1 (+0)
With Friends/Family (non-concert, non-ballgame): 7 (+0)
Concert/Ball-game drinks: 5 (+0)
Travel: 15 (+0)
People over for food: 3 (+0)
Longest Streak of no restaurant - 299 days and counting.
Longest Streak for no takeout - 130 days and counting.
New Recipes for the Year: 155
Both of these followed an older effort from 2015 that was focused only on eating out.
Final Stats
Days elapsed: 365
Times Eating Out: 313
Beer/alcohol only: 34 (11%)
Ice Cream only: 24 (8%)
Chains: 61 (includes Cleveland chains like Aladdins, Winking Lizard and Mitchells) (19%)
Work-Related: 22 (7%)
Gaming Night: 9 (3%)
Ultimate: 5 (2%)
Travel: 157 (50%) [includes above categories as appropriate]
Europe: 91 (29%) [includes above categories as appropriate]
Going forward for 2021, I'm only go focus on two things:
- I'm morbidly curious about how long my currently only ongoing streaks of "not eating in a restaurant" and "not getting takeout" continue, so I'll track those until they end.
- People have told me they genuinely enjoy reading about new recipes, so I'm going to keep doing that. If I'm going to keep doing that, I might as well track the number of new recipes I make.
With that said, here we go for 2021:
Longest Streak of no restaurant - 309 days and counting.
Longest Streak for no takeout - 140 days and counting.
New Recipes for the Year: 6
- The Weight Watchers Essential Freestyle Cookbook gave us Cornmeal-spice Crusted Tilapia. There are a lot of ways to make breaded fish (or breaded chicken for that matter), and while this one didn't break any new ground, the spice combination was very tasty and it was easy to make, so I'm sure we'll come back to it.
- For the second increment in a row we went to the Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream Desserts. This time we made the Graham Cracker Ice Cream, but instead of doing the graham crackers we did the animal cracker variant. The end result was pretty similar to the Sweet Cream Ice Cream we made last week. It was a tiny bit heavier because of the dissolved animal cracker crumbs, but I'm not honestly sure that I could have told the difference in a blind taste test. In other words, it was still very good but I'm not sure I'd bother making it again given that it has a bunch of extra steps over the prior recipe.
The remaining four new recipes were all from the December 2020 Eating Well.
- The Creamed Brussels Sprouts had a few extra steps like pan frying shallots tossed in flour for a topping because it's supposed to be for a holiday meal, but given how easy it is to steam Brussels Sprouts in the pressure cooker it was still pretty easy to make. M really liked the sauce. It's a good side for using up extra milk or cream.
- It never hurts to have more ways to make salmon. The Pan-Roasted Sesame Salmon has a nice thick sauce made up of hoisin sauce, mirin, honey, sesame oil and soy sauce, plus assorted spices. We liked it and it's easy.
- Last night we made the Creamy Mustard Chicken Thighs. We both liked the sauce, but I found the clean up associated with pan frying the thighs was more work than the sauce was worth. I guess maybe I could air fry them or something. In any event, I served it over arugula and beets, and realized after I did so that this recipe really needs to over some starches.
- I had never made a cheesecake before, but M likes cheesecake and got me a springform pan for Hanukkah. The best cheesecake every was made by Mrs. Silverman from our synagogue back home, but her granddaughter tells me that the recipe has been lost to the sands of time, which is a poetic way of saying "she never liked giving out her recipes". My friend Elise gave me her family's cheesecake recipe, but it looked very complicated for a first effort, so I turned to the Pumpkin Swirl Cheesecake. The only real challenge I had was that the springform pan is supposed to be put inside a roasting pan so you can pour boiling water around it. Unfortunately, I didn't have a pan that was quite big enough to contain the springform pan. Instead, I put the springform pan at an angle and rotated it 90 degrees every 20 minutes or so during baking. I'm pleased to report that you could not tell the difference when the cake was done. We both greatly enjoyed it. I will certainly branch out to other cheesecake recipes, but this was a credible first attempt.