6 Food Resolutions (a.k.a. Intentions) for 2013

You can argue semantics about resolutions vs. plans, goals, or what have you. Making a resolutions seems to have more to do with the cessation of something—smoking, drinking, eating sugar—rather than the initiation or start of something. Last year I covered my take on the language issues and set forth my food resolutions. And of course, they were more than food resolutions—they were life-altering resolutions. For 2013, I'm just calling them intentions, because that's what they are. I had a very powerful experience last year when I did this. Most of them happened, and many of them in ways I could not have predicted. Here's one of them: puff pastry.

Apple turnovers, part of my kitchen to-do list. 

It was a year of synchronicities. Now, here's the harder part: continuing the momentum needed to make things happen. And just trusting it will.

First and foremost, though, I want to express my gratitude toward the various people I've come in contact with in the past year whose guidance and friendship have confirmed that I'm on the right path—there are too many of you to name, but you know who you are. I started writing a cookbook, got derailed when I started testing recipes for someone else's cookbook (thanks, Dave!), and then we went away and the holidays came. I met some amazing people in the Lehigh Valley who are doing beautiful work with food, and some of those relationships continue to be rewarding (hello, the teams at Molinari's and Two Rivers, among others). And toward the end of the year, capping it off, I was asked to serve as a judge at Lehigh Valley Harvest, which I blogged about. It was a delicious honor!

Fitting with the New Year's theme, Tuesday morning's yoga class was about shutting off the negative self-talk, and instead, telling yourself you can do it, that you are perfectly good enough to do what you need to do. I don't want to get too terribly introspective here, but in the past couple of years, the change in self-identification has brought with it lots of fun times but also its fair share of doubt and inertia. It's also brought about the need for incredible, unwavering focus, which is often challenging for numerous reasons (have you met my boys?).

This year, I'm admittedly having a little bit harder time with January and this list. The stakes are higher; I suddenly have time on my hands that I didn't have before, and holes in my income I didn't have before, to match. No one seems to know what will happen to Frommers.com; the last bit of the laid-off web editors are now all officially laid off, as of December 31. It's bittersweet. I hope to continue to do work with them in a new, Google-owned incarnation, but nothing is clear at the moment.

Ok......enough preamble. Here we go!

1. Write a formal proposal for my Lehigh Valley Farmers' Cookbook. It ain't going nowhere without that.

2. Go (with proposal) to the IACP conference in San Francisco. Self-publishing is likely the end result, and not necessarily a bad one, but I want to put it out there before self-publishing is confirmed.

3. Continue to explore cuisines and dishes I haven't done much with (hello, curry!), and cook with one unfamiliar item or cuisine every other week. This was on last year's list, but it was fun and I want it to continue.

4. Integrate all three of my sites: this one, the Lehigh Valley Farmers Market site, and Nostalgia Baking. It's all me, but I don't know how to integrate these, technically speaking; I'd need development and design help for certain.  I don't know which is the "brand"? (I'm kind of laughing at the word.) Maybe it's just my namesake site, which seems most logical.

5.  Start producing more of my own content: i.e., take those integrated projects and aspects of my work and do more of my own blogging, become something resembling my own media outlet. I'm not going to stress and worry about how to find readers, but there won't be readers unless there is regular content.

6. Find new outlets for writing about food and travel.

I'm going to stop at six, because this list is smaller but more difficult than last year's. These need to be manageable tasks. I'm just going to hope that I can work toward it and that the right people will appear (and the right circumstances will emerge), in order to facilitate these big changes.

There are other intentions I want to set, mostly of a spiritual nature, but I won't go into that here. Those things, I'm just going to let them evolve on and off the mat. They make all of this possible.

How about you? Do you have any big plans, goals, intentions, resolutions, for 2013? Don't underestimate the power of a clean slate. It's harder to be optimistic, so much easier to be cynical. Anything is possible, always.