A New Year and Being Prepared
We are mid-way into January of the new year, and I have so many things I want to begin doing, and continue doing and, stop doing. I’ve started my list of goals, but recently, I heard someone say; you should look at the past year and notice what you accomplished and also what you didn’t before you set new goals.
I’m not a real dwell on the past kind of person…I always want to look ahead, but it struck me that I should look at my misfires, mistakes and goals that I thought would be good for me, but somehow didn’t really resonate.
So, what might some of those things from the past be? Hmmm…
*Lose a few pounds. Didn’t lose weight, in fact gained 4-5 lbs.
*Play more tennis – played a little more, but not much more.
*Be more prepared (for things that stress me out, but that are going to come up like impromptu dinners…which I want to do but will resist doing 99.9% of the time).
*Read more – tried but didn’t get too far. In fact, I currently have six books I’ve started and haven’t finished yet.
Anyway…you get the picture. Maybe reflecting on what you wanted and didn’t get or achieve will help you fine tune your goals for the upcoming year. Don’t overdo it with “to do’s”, be realistic about what you want and how to get there. Set priorities. If something is very important to you, make that your #1 thing, if all else gets pushed to the wayside, at least do that #1 thing.
One thing I’m getting the hang of is being prepared. I have a little more time on my hands these days so this goal is one I should be able to handle. Trying to do the things that stress me out ahead of time if possible. So, if I’m having people to dinner, have the flowers dialed in from my weeks of practice when I had more time, have some special items in the freezer so I can pull them out at a moment’s notice (things like homemade tomato and pesto sauces), have go to table settings ready so I can set a pretty table in minutes. Whatever it is, by doing some prep work, you can take the anxiety out of the equation.
Another little tidbit I picked up is, if you’re going to offer to cook something, make sure you either know how to make this dish already, or you have time to work it out ahead.
I recently suggested I could make tomato bisque soup for a beach party. Since it was December and the weather would undoubtably be bad, I thought a nice hot soup would taste good and warm us up. For this particular group, I knew canned tomato soup would not fly, so I decided I could make it from scratch.
I could make it from scratch?!? What was I thinking? I had never even tried to make tomato bisque soup before, but here I was offering to make it for a group of 14 to have at the beach. So, among the other 10,000 things to do and cook and prepare around Christmas, I now had to find a good recipe for tomato bisque soup! Luckily, I found a good sounding recipe (from Ina Garten, of course) and took a practice run at it. Luckily for me, it was good AND easy!! Not too many ingredients and it had orzo in it which gave it some texture and was a little surprise at the end of the bowl. I also had some homemade croutons, so I added those to it. Let me tell you it was so good!
Morning of the party, I ran to the store, got the ingredients, and made the soup – I wanted it to be freshly made and besides, this was the only time I could do it. I ladled the soup into my large Stanley thermos containers to keep it hot. The drive and time spent walking to the beach was over 2 hours so I was getting nervous that the soup would be cold. I was so happy when I opened the thermos, and the soup was still piping hot. I put it into compostable hot cups and had spoons so we could eat the croutons and orzo (otherwise could have just sipped it from the cup). At any rate, it was a hit, people loved it (thank you Ina!)! Everyone ate all the soup much to my relief!!
Practicing paid off, and I really learned a lesson. I can be very lazy and think I can just wing it, but this time, I made the effort to make sure this picnic soup was a success! One other tip; if you are using a new thermos and it’s crucial it keeps your food hot – test that out ahead as well. I got lucky, but it could have been disappointing if the soup showed up cold!