I hope you have a great 2006 as well!

I look forward to reading as you work your way through these resolutions.

As a cookbook/food magazine addict myself, I can certainly relate to that particular resulution.

All the best in 2006!

It looks like the Thai food resolution and the essays will be quite popular.

Even now, I have some more fresh turmeric roots burning a hole in my crisper drawer, just begging to be put to good use. That means I need to come up with something good to do with them….and as that Thai catfish curry-soup-tasty thing was so good, maybe I will make something else along those lines.

With scallops, maybe.

Dan–I am really looking forward to starting the teaching gig. I really love teaching, and really, if Heather wants, all she needs to do is ask, and I would have done private classes for her anytime she is up for it. Especially now that she has good knives, I think she will enjoy cooking even more than before–it is amazing how effortless food prep becomes once one is no longer wrestling with unwieldy and dull implements.

Also–the video thing is a great idea. I think that I will look into either fashioning some sort of blackout for the windows on the screens that we have that can be attached and disattached at will, or I will see if I can manage to get a second set of screens for the window and just permanently attach the blackouts to them.

But I think that the new kitchen would be a great place to shoot video, and I think that we could probably host some streaming video lessons on the blog, now that I am getting used to the mechanics of blogging. That would be utterly cool….

The first, comes from mail I received yesterday from a dear friend I met in calligraphy classes years ago. The article she sent talks about designing our own playing cards. It talks about the fact that there are 52 cards in a deck, 52 weeks in a year and using paper that is cut into the size of playing cards we could create our own version of cards at the rate of 1 a week. The cards could be any idea of ours that encompasses “playing” - a weekly journal per card, actual cards for playing games or any topic of our choice. Tonight I will cut the cards, tomorrow, New Years, I will start working on my first week on the first card. My topic will be family history. It starts with how a baby born in Minnesota lived most of her childhood in Brazil, Africa and ended up as an adult on a California beach.

The second resolution involves you Barbara. If your resolution is to create more Thai dishes - my second resolution will be not to just read about them but to try everyone of them in my home.

Oh, this is going to be a grand year! Happy New Year!