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Celebrating the New Year With (What Else?) Food
- Bob Benenson
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Bringing Back an Old New Year's Eve Tradition with a Homemade Twist
Barb and I have never been New Year's Eve partiers. For a number of years when we lived in Washington, D.C., we had a tradition of going out for Indian food and then watching recorded Fred Astaire movies (amazing how well these films from the 1930s and 40s have held up.
The Fred Astaire part of the equation has held up, but the Indian food tradition faded for no particular reason. I have always had an interest in sharpening my Indian cooking skills, so I turned to the New York Times NYT Cooking app (my main recipe go-to), uncovered a number of easy-to-make dishes with easily accessible ingredients, and brought our old Indian food jones into a new homemade tradition.
As you can see above, New Year's Eve dinner may not have been the most photogenic plating, but oh boy, was it good (or I should say is good because we're still working through the leftovers.
From left, we have mutter paneer (peas and Indian paneer cheese); butter chicken; and chicken tikka masala, with some organic basmati rice in the center. Here are links to the recipes if you want to raise your Indian cooking game.
Bread baking is one of those things that I enjoy doing but somehow gets lost in the shuffle. When I finally get back to it — using the no-knead recipes popularized a while back by New York baker Jim Lahey in his My Bread book — I puzzle why I ever stopped.
This beauty above is Lahey's basic recipe, for which I used local and regeneratively produced flour from Janie's Mill in Ashkum, Illinois. And now I'm hooked again.
There is a link to Lahey's recipe, adapted by legendary cookbook writer Mark Bittman, on the NYT Cooking site.
Finally, my wife Barb and I have been together for a very long time, and she positively gets me. My new kitchen calendar for 2026, a holiday gift from Barb, is appropriately titled Farmers Market. Each month features different varieties of a certain type of food — as you can see, January is Herbes de Provence — with some of the loveliest food art you can find.
I hope you had a happy holiday season and got some gifts you love too.
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