kellinator | if you post it, does that make it real? or it is more likely to jinx you when making new habits?

Pretty much every year I make a new year's resolution that I'm going to learn how to cook and actually do it, and since I make it every year you can guess how successful it is. I didn't make a resolution for it this year, I just kinda started doing it. The deep freeze was actually a real stroke of luck for me cooking-wise because when I realized how bad it was going to be that Thursday night, I looked through Everyday Food (I'd just gotten it recently after long coveting it -- James was skeptical at first, I think he thought it was just more food porn), made a list, and got enough groceries to last the weekend. So there I was with all the stuff I needed and it started to become more routine. Everything I've made so far from that cookbook has been excellent. I've been making a lot of pureed vegetable soups and crumbling up fresh whole-grain bread in them. It seems like I've been reading Mark Bittman for so long that it kinda feels like I hit a critical mass and finally internalized "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" (yeah, I know, that's actually Michael Pollan, not Bittman). (Right now we're working on the plants part and I'll worry about the not too much later.) James is even giving relatively good feedback considering what a picky eater he is, though at one point I did announce "you can not eat a pound of bacon every day, you will have a heart attack."

I really think the most important thing is to stay away from the processed crap as much as possible and use fresh ingredients.

Tonight: Butternut squash soup. Has anyone ever had their hands start peeling from handling butternut squash? Mine look like when we'd put glue all over our hands in elementary school so we could peel it off.

I really hope I can keep from backsliding now that I've posted this.