In 2025, there’s room for improvement. That room is the kitchen. Second only to our places of work, it hosts a good chunk of our waking hours — making it a natural focal point of annual resolution-making. Maybe last year you aspired to more baking, more meatless cooking, or simply more cooking, period. If you need ideas for the new year, below are a handful of goals, shared among members of the New York Times Cooking and Food staff, along with recipes to keep you on track for success.
Waste Less Food
Before you make yet-another trip to the grocery store, shop the fridge and pantry for end-of-week soups, fritters and sauces to ensure nothing goes to waste, and to keep you from buying more ingredients at risk of a garbage-can fate. Use up easy-to-waste refrigerator door staples like tomato paste in minimal-ingredient recipes that rely heavily on dried goods and take well to substitutions, but don’t fret so much about the shelf life of nearly expiration-proof items like miso. Storing fresh produce properly to extend its life as long as possible, and make use of carrot tops, kale ribs, citrus peels and herbs stems elsewhere in your cooking.
Samin Nosrat’s Whatever You Want Soup provides a foolproof template for using leftover bits and bobs of meat and vegetables accumulated during the week, particularly in the winter when all you want is a big bowl of something warm. “My aunt made it every Sunday night,” wrote one reader in the recipe comments. “She called it Weekly Review.”
A crunchy pajeon also makes for an exceptional final resting place for the vegetable knobs and trimmings left behind from other meals. Ready for dipping in a gingery soy sauce, Sohui Kim’s forgiving Korean scallion pancakes bind chopped or grated carrots, zucchini, bell peppers, kale — truly whatever you’ve got — with a bit of egg, starch and chopped kimchi.
Most likely to wilt and end up in the trash, though, are the fresh herbs (cilantro, parsley, dill, mint) bought for garnishing a single dish. So incorporate recipes into your cooking routine that use them in high volume, like pesto, salsa verde or another all-purpose green sauce. For those tougher-stemmed herbs (rosemary, thyme, sage) that you’re less likely to blend into sauces, steep them in heavy cream for flavoring Ali Slagle’s pasta with creamy herb sauce.
