My First Completed New Years' Resolution! (& extra Dec recipes)

I know that New Years' Resolutions are notorious for never getting accomplished. I have to say that for most of my life, I would try really hard for about a month or two and then give up or forget completely. I'm sure everyone has similar stories. So I decided to have a relatively simple and achievable resolution for 2014: to try (at least) one new recipe per month. And I did it! Well, one month did bleed a little into the other, but I tried well over 12 new recipes overall.

Before I compile all the recipes and reflect a bit, I thought I'd sneak in two other new recipes I tried in December. While watching Food Network, I saw Trisha Yearwood making essentially mini pecan pies and thought that I had to try it right away. I found the recipe online and made them the very next day! The only difference was that I used regular muffin tins rather than mini muffin tins, so I did double the filling amount. I think I prefer them my way. They were so incredibly easy and delicious that I've already made them twice and plan on making them again soon.

By the way, that's my brother's manly, knobbly-looking hand, not mine! Haha.

I also love watching Barefoot Contessa nowadays since I have so much free time. I saw Ina make this super simple roasted chicken. Even though it looked easy enough, I was intimidated by the idea of roasting a chicken. So I had it bookmarked for a while and finally decided to go for it. I used two small Cornish hens rather than one bigger chicken, but it seemed to be okay. While it was pretty simple and very tasty, I realized that I'm more squeamish than I expected to be with whole, raw chicken. Plus, the house smelled like chicken for a loong time afterward. So I think that it's going to be a while before I try any sort of roasted bird again. I'm definitely glad that I did it, though!

Also, bonus points for this particular recipe were the roasted halved garlic heads. I just squeezed out that goodness and spread it on some bread or onto the chicken and it was delicious! Though, I am a crazy garlic lover, so of course I would like that :)

I realize that this post is getting crazy long, but I'm just going to end with a nice little summary of my (blogged) new recipes this year. Of course there were some other recipe attempts, but they were either too much of a failure or just not very interesting to write about.

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JANUARY
Pizza from scratch & roasted brussel sprouts

FEBRUARY made up for in April!

MARCH
Double chocolate banana muffins

APRIL
Zucchini fries
Bacon & corn pizza on whole wheat crust

MAY
Protein pancakes
Chocolate avocado pancakes

JUNE
Pan con tomate

JULY
Chocolate chip shortbread bars

AUGUST
Lemon cookies

SEPTEMBER
Baked avocados
Chicken with quinoa and veggies

OCTOBER
Leftover quinoa and veggies

NOVEMBER
Mimi's Cafe carrot bread
Warm brussel sprout salad

DECEMBER
Rugelach pinwheels
Bacon jalapeno poppers
Mini pecan pies
Roasted chicken with lemon and garlic

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Even though most of these recipes were super simple and fast, I learned a lot! I especially love discovering the no knead pizza dough. I have made so many pizzas this year that my brother bought me a pizza stone for Christmas! I'll be breaking that in quite soon. I also jumped onto the quinoa band wagon. I'm not a fan of brown rice, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I actually liked quinoa.

In conclusion, I am definitely making the same resolution for this year. This time around, however, I'm going to try to lean less on baking (my comfort zone) and do more cooking. Barring some sort of horrible disaster, I think I can do it! Here we go again, I guess!

-jennkay

Categories: baking, cooking, december recipe, garlic, lemon, pecan pie, pecan tassies, resolutions, roasted chicken