New Year's Resolutions

If healthy eating is one of your New Year’s resolutions, you’re not alone. Many people, including me, start the new year with high hopes of being the person who says, “I would love some more brussels sprouts” and “No, no, just a small piece of strawberry butter cream cake” or ‘No, I’m too stuffed with brussels sprouts to eat that chocolate fudge sundae”.
Now there are some iron willed people out there who have great self control; I’m not one of those people. I love to bake and cook, healthy and not so healthy recipes, but mostly I love to eat the things I cook. Why else would we take the time to prepare something delicious and (hopefully) nutritious if we planned on denying ourselves the pleasure of eating it? Why indeed.

So, I have mixed feelings when it comes time for me to make my resolutions known when I say I want to eat a healthier diet, when really all I want is the excuse to eat a second slice of that strawberry cake.
Instead of bullying myself to eat "healthy", I have written a few resolutions that I hope will encourage healthy eating habits, but are disguised as non-"I will eat healthier" resolutions.
Some of my eating and cooking resolutions for the next year include:
1. Ferment some of my own foods or drinks. I am eager to try making my own pickles or wine after reading a few books on fermented foods. There are numerous health benefits to eating live cultured foods and drinking fermented beverages and it seems the main ingredient you need is patience. I’ll let you know how this cooking experiment progresses.
2. Cook more foreign foods. Example, I love Chicken Tika Masala, a spicy, yogurt marinated chicken curry and I eat it every time we go to Sultan’s in Stillwater, but I’ve never cooked it for myself.
3. Host a dinner party or cooking club. I love cooking, but I also love hearing about and eating other people’s cooking experiments.
And last,
4. Add pictures to this column. I’d love to accompany the recipes with pictures of when I cooked the food. I think it would add to the column. Look forward to some pictures.
I have my work cut out for me.

Here is a recipe that gets me one step closer to my foreign food resolutions and is the same type of cuisine as the Chicken Tika Masala.

Indian Chicken Stew
2 lbs. skinless, boneless chicken, cut into 1 inch pieces
1 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
5 tsp. curry powder
2 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. black pepper
2 cans - 15 oz. garbanzo beans
2 cans - 14.5 oz. diced tomatoes
1 c. chicken broth
1 bay leaf
2 tbsp. lime juice
9 oz. package fresh spinach

Lightly coat a slow cooker with cooking spray or oil. Add chicken, onion, and garlic to the slow cooker. Add curry powder, ginger, salt, and pepper to the slow cooker. Toss to coat. Stir in drained beans, undrained tomatoes, broth, and bay leaf. Cover and cook on high-heat setting 4 to 5 hours or low-heat setting 8 to 10 hours.
Stir lime juice into cooked stew. Stir spinach leaves into stew and let stand 2 to 3 minutes to wilt. Serve with rice.

If you would like more information on fermenting foods, a good book on general fermentation is Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz.
If you would like more information on starting a cooking club, visit www.bonappetit.com for an outline on organizing a club.