It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

Describe your 2025 in food.

This blog rebooted with a theme on January 1, 2021: food.

Also adventure, cast iron, the outdoors and simple living.  It was the middle of freaking covid and I was basically trapped in my house because of travel restrictions and winter and work from home and I latched onto the idea of rebooting the blog I had written for a decade and a half with a little less TMI themed introspection. (Funny how it has drifted back to that, huh?) 

But I wrote a lot about food. Bread. Skillet cooking. Campfire recipes. 

And, of course, needing to hit a quota for posting on a blog meant I did more of those things to have content to write and post about. The years 2021 and even 2022 were very food focused as a result.

This past year I have been pre-occupied with other things.

I still bake my bread (in fact I have a loaf proofing on the counter as I write this) and we are pretty much exclusively a cast iron cookware household (though I have not bought a new piece in three or four years, a testament to the durability and quality I suppose) but my dabbling in new and interesting recipes has dwindled.

In the past few weeks or so and specifically since returning from Japan I have been to the local Lucky Supermart (Asian grocery store) and stocked my house with rices and spices and teas and more, mostly to hold onto that post-travel vibe of trying new and interesting foods every other day during our vacation,  I guess. But experimenting otherwise?  It’s been a slow year for the foodie in me that way.

We are all experiencing the result of gaslighting government, of course. Grocery prices are higher than they have ever been. These days are the times for stretching staples and simplifying recipes to keep the food budget in check. I guess if you want a real perspective on our 2025 year in food it has been one of economics more than anything: adapting our recipes to use whatever meat is on sale or whichever frozen vegetables are cheaper than their golden hued fresh counterparts. We eat at home significantly more, cooking at home, and I eat out lunch maybe once a month weaning myself down from once or twice a week (which itself was a reduction from my daily downtown dining experience pre-pandemic.) 

Eat cheap. But eat well. We don’t starve and we don’t suffer for variety, but we do squeeze value out of our food budget these days. Tho… I suspect that’s the answer a lot of people would give this year.