55 BURGERS 55 FRIES 55 TACOS 55 PIES 55 COKES 100 TATER TOTS 100 PIZZAS
read it & eat - december '23
Welcome to read it & eat. This is the seventh edition of the newsletter to date. It’s the last of 2023 or—by the time you’re reading this—the first of 2024. It all depends on how you look at it, which is what we’re doing here: looking back at our year of cooking and then ahead at what’s next (which hopefully includes a smoker🤞).
Hey everyone, if you couldn’t already tell by the smoker comment, it’s Gary here! I’m excited to be writing this intro because it means 2023 is coming to a close. Not excited because it was a bad year—in fact, it was a pretty darn good year that started off with Sierra and I getting engaged in January. 💍
It’s fitting then that on New Year’s Eve we returned to our favorite restaurant, Odd Duck, where I proposed to her. Well, almost proposed to her, but that’s another story. (Don’t worry; it did happen that evening!)
As we sat there enjoying some of the most delicious food ever, we reflected on everything that’s happened between those two visits. We’ve done a lot of eating, a lot of learning, and of course, a lot of cooking—some of which was, shall we say… not the best. 😅 The flops made the bangers all the more satisfying, though, and at the end of it all, we’re just blessed to have had so many memorable meals in 2023.
That’s about as good of a segue as it gets, so let’s move on to the meat and potatoes of this very special end-of-year edition of read it & eat. Get ready for some numbers.
2023: a read it & eat recap
Si here! I’ve been religiously using a journaling app called Daylio for a few years now. It’s a great way to track your habits over time, and this year I started logging a lot more food-related information in the app. For instance, I began tracking when I ate seafood (which was only 38 times, to my surprise) because I wanted to eat more fish and less red meat after discovering I have high cholesterol. I also wanted to track how many days I ate vegetarian (partially because of the cholesterol thing, but also because the beef industry is doing terrible things to the environment).
But enough yappin’ about my arteries and the state of our planet. Because I created a recap of our year in food based on my Daylio annual report, and that’s way more fun to talk about:
In 2023, Gary and I made a homemade meal 242 times. While we were at it, we tried 113 new recipes—many of them from newly acquired cookbooks like Molly Baz’s More is More and Brad Leone’s Field Notes for Food Adventure (thanks for that last one, Alex).
Gary’s favorite 🌟
First of all, I’m shocked that we tried so many new recipes! It’s hard to keep track unless you do it like Si, so it was a pleasant surprise that we experienced so many new meals. For me, my favorite discovery was this sheet pan japchae from perhaps my most-used cookbook, Korean American. So easy, so delicious, and perfect for a weeknight dinner.
Si’s favorite 🌟
For me, the soups we made from homemade stock were some of the most memorable meals we had. There was a Taiwanese beef noodle soup we became obsessed with, and we also made Bon Appetit’s chicken and rice soup with garlicky chile oil at least a dozen times.1
We also ate out a lot—approximately 150 times according to Daylio. As Gary mentioned at the top, our most recent experience dining out was at Odd Duck. Other local favorites we couldn’t get enough of included Julie’s Noodles, Vic & Al’s, and Vamonos.
And finally, we ate dessert a whopping 284 times in 2023. I have no regrets, and I don’t plan to slow down on sweets in 2024. In fact, I hope to take on one technically challenging bake a month next year, because it’s time I finally learn how to make a pâte à choux and laminate butter into dough for croissants. And after nailing my first pavlova2 and baking up a layer cake for our best friends’ couple shower this past year, I’m hungry for more ambitious bakes in 2024.
Onwards and upwards into the new year
Thank you for the excellent roundup, Si, and for making the amazing graphics above! It’s honestly so cool to reflect on all these cooks and put some numbers behind the time we spent in the kitchen. Literally hundreds of hours later, I do feel like we’ve learned so much. There’s so much more to go, though, and I’m more excited than ever to keep cooking (and writing).
With that in mind, if you’re reading this and have any ideas about dishes you’d like us to make, techniques to attempt, ingredients to explore—or anything, really—please don’t hesitate to let us know! This started off as a glorified food journal, but the response from people in our lives who are following and reading has been so lovely. 💖
As I reflect on things as we’re wont to do around this time, one thing is for sure: I want to write more in the new year. We’ve been doing well with monthly posts, but I want to gain some momentum and start sending little notes as the days and weeks pass. If you see this, please keep me accountable (and suggest something you want to see here)!
As a final aside, I want to leave you with some pics of our last cook of the year. Our dear friends Mollie and Dan visited for the weekend, and this meal really felt like a culmination of all the love and time we put into food this year.
I’m nothing if not longwinded, so—if you made it this far—thank you for reading from the bottom of both our hearts. Wishing you all the best in 2024, and we’ll see you again soon! ✌
For real, though, we could not get enough of this soup. The garlicky chili oil now goes on basically everything.
Si was ready to never look at a pavlova again after how much of this we ate. However, there’s something really rewarding about nailing a meringue like that, so I’m sure we’ll be making it again sooner rather than later. 😈
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Suggestions for 2024: I would love to see you follow through on croissants and the special way to add the butter, which appears to be the main ingredient.
Could you tackle brownies with the view of reducing the sugar?
Your steak dishes are super appealing….
Your biggest fan,
Carla Ware