Tag: Melissa Clark

Resolutions for Eating

Reducing food waste is SO important!

Melissa Clark is an extraordinaire food writer for the New York Times. She has set her food resolutions for 2025.

She is missing the most important food resolution: REDUCE your food waste! Food waste is an enormous waste of energy. time and water. Food waste is an enormous contributor to our climate crisis. Read about it here:

Tips to fight food waste
https://www.ecowatch.com/holiday-food-waste-reduction-tips.html

And then read Melissa’s resolutions below:

3 resolutions for eating and drinking in 2025

New Year’s resolutions are fast upon us, and chances are that your list will include some version of trying to eat better. I’m here to help.

Food is both my profession and my obsession, which means it’s my job to consume delicious things every single day, reveling in each bite of tangy arugula salad, silky roasted salmon or gooey blackout cake. The key for me is to maximize the pleasure while also leaning into moderation, and to generally eat more sustainably.

I want to share this balancing act with you. Here’s my approach, broken down into easily digestible morsels.

1. Learn to cook something — or something new.

If you’re just starting out in the kitchen, make 2025 the year you learn to cook. The recipe columnists and editors at New York Times Cooking have compiled a recipe collection for absolute beginners, and in the course of 10 dishes you’ll acquire basic skills to bolster your confidence.

Start with Eric Kim’s tuna mayo rice bowl, which doesn’t even require turning on the stove if you have leftover rice or a rice cooker. Genevieve Ko’s cheesy eggs on toast is equally good for breakfast as it is for dinner. And my lemony chicken with potatoes and oregano is easy to make on a sheet pan, and it’s just the thing to slather with your favorite condiment, be it chile sauce, mayonnaise, mustard or all three.

Keeping your pantry well stocked will get you halfway there — and here are some tips on how to do just that. Even on nights when I don’t have time to plan or run to the store, I know I’ll still be able to cook something incredibly satisfying that’s often faster and cheaper than getting takeout.

If you’re a seasoned cook but feel tapped out for inspiration, commit to making one new recipe per month. You get bonus points if it includes ingredients or techniques you’ve never tried before. Dishes like one-pot mushroom and ginger rice (which calls for velveting the mushrooms) and crunchy scrunched cabbage salad with fried almonds are just waiting to help you get back in your groove. You can also sign up for our What to Cook newsletter for even more suggestions.

2. Eat less meat.

Cutting back on meat gets easier for me as the years go by. As it turns out, the less meat I eat, the less of it I crave. (That is sadly untrue of cookies, though.) And replacing animal-based foods with whole grains, legumes and nuts has been linked to a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Now, I mostly use meat as seasoning for vegetables, beans or pasta. A little prosciutto, a sprinkle of bacon or a few ounces of ground turkey go a long way.

Maple-roasted tofu with butternut squash and bacon, spicy tomato white bean stew, and one-pot tortellini with prosciutto and peas all keep the meat minimal and the satisfaction high. (For some meatless recipe ideas, subscribe to my colleague Tanya Sichynsky’s vegetarian newsletter, The Veggie.)

3. Drink less alcohol.

Drinking more moderately is about emphasis in my book. I’ve come to realize that drinking more low- or no-alcohol cocktails and mocktails is just as satisfying as drinking alcohol.

I’ve also discovered that the ceremony of having a drink is just as important as what’s in the glass, if not more so. Give me something with a deep bittersweet tang in a fancy coupe as a gateway to a congenial evening, and I won’t ever miss the hangover.

A sweet and citrusy nonalcoholic French 75, an olive filled nonalcoholic dirty lemon tonic and a ruby-hued hibiscus fizz are fit for festive toasting or quiet imbibing, whatever the occasion.

2025 is looking delicious, indeed.

New Year, Less Food Waste

40% of food is wasted in the United States!

How can you turn food waste into a game! ideas for frittas, soup, rice bowls, wraps and grain bowls below.

We have a crisis of food waste in the United States. Households account too much wasted food. Not only does wasting food, waste valuable resources and lots of water, but also food in our landfills decomposes creating and giving off methane gas which is a harmful air pollutant contributing to global warming.

Melissa Clark for the New York Times is writing about ideas to deal with food waste

“Susan Shain’s recent article for The New York Times has jolted me back into my composting groove. She wrote about how an Ohio community substantially reduced its food waste, which is a huge contributor to greenhouse gases and responsible for twice as many emissions as commercial aviation in the United States. That’s a lot of emissions.
Households, she writes, “account for 39 percent of food waste in the United States, more than restaurants, grocery stores or farms. Change, then, means tackling the hard-wired habits of hundreds of millions of individuals, community by community, home by home.”
The statistics left me nowhere to hide. What we do in the kitchen can make a difference: creating meal plans, shopping with a list, composting and using up the leftovers.
This last one is my happy place. I turn it into a game, saving bits of this and that in little containers, then puzzling out how to use them to seed future meals.
That handful of sautéed kale, those roasted vegetables, a tranche of salmon fillet? Chop it all up and fold it into a creamy risotto for color and flavor, or make a base for a loaded frittata.
Half-wilted bunches of cilantro or parsley and bags of baby arugula or spinach can find homes in all kinds of soups, like a lemony turkey and white bean soup, or pasta dishes like a pantry-friendly midnight pasta. Sturdy salads — cucumber or, say, yesterday’s takeout green papaya — will work as a topping for any rice bowl, including sesame salmon and katsudon (pork cutlet bowls, so beloved in the anime series, “Yuri!!! On Ice”).
If you have a motley band of root vegetables softening in your produce drawer, perhaps from an overenthusiastic spree at the farmers’ market or a surprise bonanza from your CSA box, you can upcycle them into a warming, adaptable vegetable soup. Enlist your wilted or leftover greens; rutabagas, turnips and kohlrabi, come on in!
As for leftover dessert, a batch of brookies or bread pudding (made from stale bread). Let’s just say this is never an issue in my sweet-toothed family. We gleefully finish every crumb.
https://www.ecowatch.com/food-waste-guide.html

1. Take inventory of your fridge and pantry before you go shopping to make sure you prevent overbuying.

2. Create a meal plan so you can utilize ingredients appropriately. 

3. Buy “ugly” foods of all shapes and sizes. 

4. Properly store food in the fridge for maximum freshness. 

5. For vegetables past their prime, repurpose them in soups, casseroles, frittatas and more. 

6. Compost! For more on how to do that, see EcoWatch’s composting guide here.

Food waste from PBS:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/food-waste-is-contributing-to-climate-change-whats-being-done-about-it

Food Waste 101: The Facts and Solutions