If you can and have the means, I highly recommend donating to Family Meal, a Portland-based nonprofit designed to help food service and agricultural workers during a medical debt crisis. Your help right now is needed more than ever. Thank you.
HAPPY NEW YEAR! I’m so please 2021 is now upon us – there’s so many exciting things to come this year, even amongst the gloom of everything that carried over from 2020 – but just knowing that it’s a new time is reassuring. (Or maybe just me?)
So I’ve returned to Eugene since term started up yesterday. I’m quite optimistic about everything because I have my smallest course load yet and that there’s a bunch of opportunities coming up. Maybe it’s still the new year optimism rubbing in its prime, but I’m just… so hopeful!
I wanted to ring in the year with a challenge for myself and maybe for you too – and you’ll have seen it in the title – but it’s #cookJan, a mini-challenge of sorts, created by the amazing Alice Slater. As a rejection of the dieting and weight loss hysteria that plagues people in their new year resolutions, Slater came up with this to go against that, to which she herself put it: “the goal is to enjoy and celebrate food, cooking and eating, whatever that may look like to you.”
Just reading her blog post led me to an epitome: doing this kind of unbridled “display” of love for food was exactly what I was looking for. Granted, I was already trying to do more by branching outside of foods I was already familiar with, but this would be slightly different. So for January, I’ll be trying a new recipe and uploading a YouTube video showing what I did and seeing how everything turned out!
Why YouTube? Well, I did a poll on Twitter about what video content I should do, and the overwhelming majority of pollers said I should make food. I’m sorry to say I won’t exactly be creating recipes, but I’ll be cooking, hopefully bringing a colorful commentary, and trying my best to not mess up. (Is that entertaining? We’ll see!)
But besides that, I did want to give my take on the same issue that started #cookJan.
I know for myself, I’ve always made resolutions around making weight loss and getting fit the main goals I spent the year working on. The amount of power I gave the scale and letting numbers take away a lot of happiness and joy I found in my having a healthy, working body is almost too shameful to think about.
However, 2020 (in all the shit it brought and all) created a space for reflection and reprioritizing. I realized I did enjoy working out for feeling good about myself and being strong and healthy. I re-realized how much power I had in making things go the way I want them to, and that in the last few months of 2020 I was able to see and feel the difference that taking consistent, concrete actions did for me. So I wanted to continue bringing that same motivation into 2021, and hopefully extend that to you too, dear reader.
Your body is great – it does so many things a day, and most of it is unconscious. What you can do and what you continue to do, through the good and the bad, is extraordinary. Don’t forget to give yourself credit for what you can do, instead of continually beating yourself up for what you can’t (or haven’t been able to) achieve yet.
This isn’t me saying you need to lose weight or not exercise – I just hope whatever you’re doing day in and day out makes your mind and body happy. This pandemic is stressful, so I hope you are able to find a bit of solace whenever you can. Perhaps doing exercise or eating makes you feel better – if so, I hope you do it.
For me, cooking and taking back the fear I always had about eating is my motivation for doing #cookJan – I’ve been enjoying the time I’ve spent in the kitchen and I want to continue pushing myself in that way. So it’s a double whammy of an activity for me, in cooking more but also being particularly intentional about it. I hope you can do something that you love and also push yourself too, because we’ve all been stuck in our routines that we’ve developed since the beginning of the pandemic that it might be fun to shake things up!
All in all, if you’re not looking to cook or eat any differently, you can still apply the concept in other ways, because it’s basically doing something that takes away stress (or at the very least, doesn’t add more of it to your plate) and carving out time and space to appreciate it. Who doesn’t love trying to do that?
But back to my actual #cookJan, haha, you might be wondering what’s on the menu for me to try for the rest of January. Well, for this week I’ve been wanting to do more with pasta (that isn’t tomato sauce or stir fried) so I’m going to try making this lemon butter chicken pasta but instead of cooking the chicken plainly to dredge it in flour and make it more like a chicken piccata (when I combine it with the sauce and whatnot).
Will it work? I have no idea! There’s just been a cravings of having something acidic plus pasta so I thought to combine them. And perhaps it may be fun to watch (or not, who knows… that’s almost half the excitement behind all this, wondering if things will turn out well!)
But I want to know if you’ll be joining Slater and I in #cookJan! Comment below or Tweet at me what your plans are. If not, do you have suggestions for what I should make in the coming weeks? Want to follow along as I cook? Follow me on Twitter anyway and subscribe to my YouTube channel to see it all unfold. I can’t wait to cook and eat more with you!
Phew! Who knew heading into 2021 would be as much of a whirlwind as it’s been so far? I guess in comparison to 2020, this is easy, though. That’s this week from me, I suppose.
Me? My first article with the Daily Emerald came out yesterday! It’s “Overlooked eateries to try in 2021” where I gave my recommendations for some places for students (and community members) to try in Eugene. This was also something that I’d been wanting to write, and the perfect timing of the new year helped me finally make it (more) timely.
For now, the Food Fumble Hotline podcast is project to be returning next week, while a YouTube video is (like I mentioned above) is in the works! I can’t wait to make more things!
Even though we may all be super motivated (or not) to be going back into the normal pacing of things, don’t forget to take breaks and pace yourself. Motivation wears off quickly when you’ve done too much in the beginning, the year just began after all. I hope you all have a lovely rest of your week and do consider joining #foodJan – I would love to see how others are taking the month in stride and doing new things revolved around eating, eating and the pursuit of good food.
Stay safe and well! COVID-19 is still very prevalent, and with winter illnesses also afloat it’s even more important than now to be cautious!
Have you eaten yet? If not, don’t forget to!
Em
Originally published on sikfanmei.home.blog on January 5, 2021.
0 Responses