I didn’t actually make my New Year’s resolutions until January 18th this year, and I was not particularly ambitious: my goal for 2010 is to read one new book per week and cook one new recipe per week. The only reason I don’t do these things already (since I have abundant free time and thus no excuse) is that my natural inclination is to repeat the familiar, because it takes less effort. Because I am lazy. Hopefully, I can push myself out of my comfort zone at least a little.

I will blog to keep myself honest.

Week 1 Recipe: Fennel Soup

3 fennel bulbs
2 small onions
2 small tart apples

Chop everything, including the fennel greens. Saute until tender. Add 4 C broth. Cook together. Blend.

This recipe was posted by a big pile of fennel at the Saturday Berkeley farmers market, and I thought, what the heck. I’ve been trying to east seasonally and this seemed like a good opportunity. It was pretty good! I ate it for dinner for a week with bread and cheese. Okay, and a couple times with tortilla chips. They were my Christmas tortilla chips, I had to eat them sometime. And, I discovered that chopping fennel after chopping onions gets rid of the onion smell on your hands!

Week 2 Recipe: Lentil Soup
Recipe here

I’ve already made this twice. I love that it’s vegetarian, I love that it’s healthy, I love that it’s cheap, I love that it’s reasonably tasty without the yogurt and totally delicious with the yogurt. Basically, I’m going to have this for lunch every day until spring. Yes, I know that goes against the purpose of the new recipe each week, but I still have dinners to be creative with. Besides, I hate being hungry at work and this fills me up.

Week 3 Recipe: Tomato sauce with onion and butter
Recipe here

I don’t usually eat pasta sauce, so this was a real experiment. I ended up liking it! It’s very buttery, and I had to cook it 20 minutes longer than the recipe called for (maybe I had extra-wet tomatoes?) but it ended up all right.

This is also the first time the resolution paid off. I didn’t really want to cook tonight (which is to say: I wanted to eat Kraft Dinner tonight), but it’s the last day of the third week, so I opened up my Julie & Julia Netflix and got to it.

Next week I’d like to cook something with more than three ingredients, because this is silly.

Week 1 Book: Snow White and Rose Red by Patricia C. Wrede

I re-read all my Patricia C. Wrede books between Christmas and New Year’s, but I had never gotten more than a few pages into this one, probably because it is written like, “Prithee, wouldst thou gather herbs in yonder wood?”, which is… pretty awful. Which is too bad because it was otherwise pretty good.

Week 2 Book: The Magic City by E. Nesbit

Another unread book from my shelf, this one purchased over the summer in Ottawa. Nesbit has an outstanding ability to capture the inherent joy and tragedy of childhood without being melodramatic about it like I was when I described it as “the inherent joy and tragedy of childhood,” and this is a good example of it.

I was three days late reading this, but I hadn’t made the resolution yet, so it doesn’t count.

Week 3 Book: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

This book deserves most of the praise it’s gotten, and I can see how it would be excellent for getting high school kids excited about a book, and more importantly, about discussing a book and the (good, important!) issues it raises, but man: there is no way Berkeley would become a police state. Seriously, the city council would pass a resolution banning the Department of Homeland Security within days if they tried to pull that. And Code Pink would form a militia. An annoying militia that would turn the rest of America against us.

Uh oh.