What's Cooking: A New Year's Resolution

 

Life is funny. It really does ebb and flow. Not quite ready to put 2013 to bed, though, I thought it would be nice to do a quick recap on the year...gotta admit that it's been a pretty good one!

I coaxed in the new year with a post on, well, worms and soil! Mainly for the amusement of mentioning "boutique composting," but also because soil just seems like the right thing on which to build a foundation for the year. Not a new one on My Munchable Musings, genetic modification was a recurrent theme, likely because of the stir around labeling GMOs and this year's World Food Prize landing in the hands of three crop bioengineers. On the opposite end of the farming spectrum, there was much excitement over National Farmers Market Week. New favorite 'holiday'?

With a focus on food, plenty of edibles graced the site. Smoothies, greens (I heart kale), and naturally green smoothies. Ramps made their debut on the blog and kohlrabi came back. Italy once again captured my heart on a trip to Sicily, and caponata became a new favorite summer staple. Of course no year would be complete without its share of chocolate, including a discussion of the critically important 'Emergency Chocolate'.

A fair amount of life also happened. January saw Barack Obama inaugurated again, and I shivered on the Mall early one winter's morn to hear him mention the words 'Climate Change'. Not much later, I plodded around the perimeter of his big White House on the largest climate change rally ever in the US. My friends and I started a nerdy book club on, what else, consumption and overconsumption. During a week of underconsuming, I pledge to Live Below the Line for a second year and raised $400 for the Rainforest Foundation.

I got rejected from PhD programs (sigh...hopefully in a couple year), ran my first marathon (solid 10 minute miles, baby), and then proceeded to turn 27 (double sigh). Um, and oh yeah, I moved. Not just back to the West Coast, and not anywhere truly exotic, but across The Pond to our mother English speaking nation: Great Brittania. Despite rejection, I'm still on a path to becoming over-educated and now embracing the starving grad student life on a masters programme.

My Munchable Musings celebrated its fourth bloggiversary, with hopefully many more to come. Try as one might to keep some consistency, there are times when certain things just fall through the cracks. For all my good intentions to sustain MMM through this particular trans-Atlantic move, it has proven to be one of those times. But I finally seem to have my bearings, so reining in some of the ambition, I am resolving to post at minimum once per week in year 2014 (and draw a bit more on my new surroundings). The bottom line: all in all, it's been a good year.