It's Been A Year: The 4th Annual Weekly Eats Edition

 

It's the fourth anniversary of the first weekly eats post and time to celebrate "Birchwood New Year".  Let's take a look back at this year's Best of the Best.

How It Started

I started as a recipe blogger and wanted to branch out into something else but I wasn't sure what.  At the same time I was newly married and trying to get a handle on the transition from cooking for one to cooking for a family.  I figured that if I just started writing about our meals I would get better at meal planning...what happened instead is that I got worse about meal planning but enjoyed writing about it so I've kept on blogging about it.

 

The First Weekly Eats Post

Year One Recap

Year Two Recap

Year Three Recap

 

How It's Going

It was a rocky year. I didn't have any problems that I couldn't solve, but it was very draining to cycle through not one but two bad work situations and some on-going food issues.  The job thing was fixed through another round of job hopping, and the food thing is a longer term project.  Basically after a few years of Running All The Miles and failing to figure out how to eat to support that, my sense of hunger and fullness is entirely out of wack.  I've cut back on the running, and I've accepted that it's going to take a while to figure out the food situation.

In the thick of things I wasn't feeling like my normal sparkly self and didn't feel like writing about it, so I stepped away from the blog.  It seemed so stupid to keep writing that we ate mac n'cheese for dinner on Tuesday and that I ran 5 miles and that I watched a trashy reality show. Why bother?

A few weeks in to my blogging break I was trying to find a recipe and hit up the blog archives.  Yes it's stupid but...it's really pretty cool to have a four year diary seen through the lens of food.  I decided to pick up where I'd left off, though I thought I'd make food less of a focus.  I changed "Weekly Eats" to "Weekly Round Up" and got back on the blogging horse.

(True Confession just in case it applies to anyone else - once I stopped blogging it was very hard to start again.  I had so much to say that trying to write it all down was overwhelming.  I "ate the elephant" by breaking up it up into a few very choppy posts, and since I had a few weeks off work I decided to keep writing.  I ended up keeping up a schedule of one post per weekday for a bit there, and the more I did it the easier the writing got.)

So where do things stand now?  Imma keep blogging in the same imperfect way.

It's time to take a look at the Best of the Best from the year.

The Best New Recipe That I Tried This Year

Roasted Root's Mediterranean Shrimp Pasta

 

Best New Family Dinner of the Year

 

Hunger Thirst Play's Instant Pot Copycat Chipotle Chicken

 

Runners Up for Best New Recipe of the Year

Shutterbean Sausage Mushroom Stuffing (part of our Thanksgiving for Two which just might have been my favorite meal of the year). 

Fannetastic Food's Healthy Chicken Broccoli Rice Casserole

 

Feel Good Foodie Shish Tawook

 

Emilie Eats Baked Buffalo Tofu Nuggets

Best New Snack of the Year

Featherstone Nutrition Bourbon Sweet Potato Snack Cookies

Best New Dessert of the Year

Sally's Baking Addiction Lemon Blueberry Tart
 

Runner Up for Best New Dessert of the Year

The Girl Who Ate Everything S'mores Pie

 

Most Exciting Use of Leftovers Discovered This Year

Leftover ham is great in quiche!  I can't count the number of times that we've been inundated with leftover ham after Easter or Christmas and ended up throwing it out.  This year I learned that I could pack up leftover ham in ziplock bags and stow it in the freezer and then revive it in quiche.

That's enough about food!  Let's talk TV and books.

Best TV Shows

Queens' Gambit
What We Do in the Shadows (the movie and the TV show)
High Maintenance
Shtisel Season 3
 

It's not exactly a TV show, but I very much enjoyed the Certain Starting Place Youtube channel.  I worked my way through the recaps of the Best Picture Oscar Winners and have gotten most of the way through the Did the Right One Win series.

 

Which brings me to the most influential blog post that I read this year, which was The Stripe's One Of My Just for Fun Goals. Grace started working her way through the AFI Top 100 list as a way to shake up her Netflix queue.  I got to thinking about the list and wrote a blog post on it, where I concluded that I'd seen 68 of these movies and it might be fun to see a few more, but there was no way I was going to just sit down and watch 32 movies just because they were on some list...well then I saw a few more of the movies and all of a sudden I took off on a journey to watch all 100.

Best AFI Top 100 Movies That I Saw This Year

Platoon
2001: A Space Odyssey
Shawshank Redemption
Apocalypse Now & Hearts of Darkness
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

 

For context, you need to understand that 2001 was the only movie on this list that I was interested in seeing.  I would never have been interested in seeing Platoon, Shawshank, or Apocalypse Now in a million years.  I had a dire prejudice that Lord of the Rings would be boring and wanted nothing to do with it.  Then I sat down and saw these movies for myself and was absolutely wowed.

Best Books

The Last Flight by Julie Clark

Marathon Woman by Kathrine Switzer

When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood
In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes (I read this after I wrote a post about book and movie adaptations.  This is one where the book and the movie went it different directions and I can't make the call about which was better...so I recommend both!)
Two Girls Down by Louisa Luna

That's it for Birchwood New Year!  Thanks for reading my ramblings.