Musings

Happy new year!

I quit making big life resolutions a couple seasons ago, but last January, I wrote about my food resolutions for the coming year. They were simple and straightforward and accessible, since they came from the space where I spend the most time–the kitchen.

As I compiled an eating wishlist for 2013, I thought about how I like to cook and how I like to eat – and what I’d like to cook and eat more and less of. Nothing too esoteric, I promise. Scroll down to see my food resolutions for the year.

Are you making any food-related resolutions? I’d love to hear in the comments.

**Food Resolutions to Make in 2013**

1. Host more dinner parties. Dinner parties are dead. Long live the dinner party. Either way, I love dinner parties – hosting them, going to them, watching the progression of the evening from slight awkwardness to complete ease. We have yet to add a dining room table to our small apartment, but guests never seem to mind perching their plates on their knees. Still, I find excuses not to host: people are busy, I don’t know which friends to pair with other friends, I’m tired. No more, not in 2013.

In most header notes for mashed potato recipes, the Russet, Yukon, or Peruvian Purple comes off as a vehicle for butter and cream–or bacon, chives, sour cream, mascarpone, and cheddar. The existence of roasted potatoes, baked potatoes, and French fries assure us that potatoes taste pretty good on their own. Yet when we go to mash, we bring on the butter.

Last week, in one of the sweetest and best-written essays about food I’ve read in a while, Tom Junod over at Esquire taught me the Mashed Potato Rule. “There is no such thing as bad mashed potatoes as long as they’re actually potatoes, mashed,” he writes. Junod was comparing real mashed potatoes to horrible out-of-the-box flaked “mashed potatoes.” But the same rule extends to the question of whether mashed potatoes have to be instruments for conveying saturated fat to your tastebuds.