Food: Your personal year in review for 2025

I became a vegetarian! Since then, I've had a focus on Indian/Chinese cuisine with a side focus on plant based proteins. It's been amazing and I'm so glad to have done it. I like to treat myself to a big plate of fried rice with some sweet potato rolls on the side on the weekends.

Sometimes it's hard to feel good about myself but that makes a pretty big bullet point in things I've done this year that make a difference, besides the rest of the things I've continued to do from years prior to make the world better.

Amy's frozen meals have become a go-to for a low calorie, health-adjacent dinner on work nights. The chili mac is a personal favorite!

Best thing I ate this year was breakfast at an unassuming diner in Duluth, MN. My buddy and I were in town to see Halestorm and Lindsey Stirling. The show was amazing, but the next morning left us ravenous. I googled breakfast and chose a place mostly at random.

What I ended up getting was eggs benedict with miso pork belly and gochujang. It was incredible. Unfortunately Duluth is a near 4 hour drive so I probably won't be back for several years.

The best food I had this year was black cod dish, where the fish had been marinated in a miso sauce and later cooked on the flame (japanese technique named robotayaki). This was part of a tasting menu, where every single dish was delicious, even though I clearly had my favorite.

My favorite meal was something I started cooking this year. Not sure how to describe it exactly. It's kind of like a curry but with way less sauce rhan a typical curry, I'm using onions, carrots, tomatoes, fresh curcuma, cayenne pepper, paprika and nutmeg for the base (cooked long enough that they basically from a sauce), tempeh for the proteins and near the end, I add some bell pepper, zuccini and mushrooms, all 3 cooked just enough to be not be raw while keeping their texture. I always eat this whith rice, of course. Interestingly, my first try didn't have the tomatoes and I was super happy when I figured out that what I felt was mussing was just some acidity, which can easily be added with something like tomatoes.

On the baking side, I learned to make bread. My first attempt went surprising well. I used some basic white flour and instant yeast (which are both far from ideal), but the result was still better that the garbage that Dutch supermakets have the audacity of calling "bread". Obviously, my technique improved and I'm now usually using a mix of spelt flour and whole wheat, with sourdough starter and a bit of instant yeast to ensure I'll still always have a good result.

I had a minor disaster with the dish described above, when I tried some fresh peppers to replace the cayenne powder. The mix I bought included a habanero pepper, and even just half made the dish almost too spicy for me to be able to eat it. It tasted like a raging fire, with a slight hint of what I normally expect from the dish.

This year (maybe last year? Idk at this point but whatever) I discovered my love of Palestinian food, I've been trying a lot since I moved! Also since moving to Brooklyn I've had a lot of time to try new places all within walking/public transpo distance, and finally started using Beli to track everything. So far my top 5 are:
Musaafer
Ayat
Thai diner
Taku Sando
Win Son

If anyone else has any recs or honestly would like to meet up around the area feel free to respond here or DM me! I swear I'm kinda nice.

I've got a couple of big hitters this year, adding two new recipes to my repertoire (technically three, I guess, but I consider two of them to be part of the same dish) that my family quite likes (actually my kids complain a bit about the stew.)

First recipe being Spinach Bonchon, a Korean side dish that my kids really like, with my older one actually constantly requesting it. It's very simple, basically boiled, wilted spinach with green onions, garlic, sesame oil + seeds, soy sauce, gochugaru and salt. It's fantastic.

The second being two recipes, which would be Moroccan Harira stew with Moroccan bread to go with. Ingredients are too much to list here, but it's a very hearty stew that is vegetarian, but could be easily made to be vegan by using veggie broth (though does chicken broth count as vegetarian? I'm neither, but that's what I usually use when I make this.). It's absolutely packed with vegetables, lentils and chickpeas and really has a unique flavor that my wife loves. I'm also a big fan and as an American, it's a nice alternative to chili as something I can make a lot of and then keep in the fridge to eat over the week. The flavors only get better after a day.

When I made this particular stew, I figured I should have some authentic bread to go along with it, so I looked up a receipe for what is apparently called Khobz. I usually end up making two loaves of this Moroccan bread and we end up eating both over the week, even if we don't have any stew to go along with it; it's very quick and simple, needing only about an hour to rise, so it's easy to quickly make day of when I'm planning on making Harira.

Edit: I guess I should also say that this year I've become a baker. I've been cooking for like 18 years now, but never really liked baking much because it feels so much less loose to me than cooking and I often failed. But this year my wife and I finally started watching The Great British Baking Show for the first time and it inspired me to give it a try. I won't say it's a passion for me, but it acts as a supplement to my cooking, as I often find myself needing bread and rather than going to the store to pick up a bag of burger buns or something, I realize I can often just whip them up pretty quickly on my own and they'll taste better and not be full of bullshit like at the store. By far one of my favorite baked goods to make is Indian Naan, as it's very fast to make and tastes delicious.

It's really fun to be able to just throw something together and have some fresh baked goods to go along with dinner.

Being pescetarian isn't always easy but I had some nice food experiences in 2025.

I had a really nice vegan curry laksa that I need to figure out a recipe for so I can make it at home.

A friend of mine kept regaling me with his memories of suya from back in Nigeria, a smoky, peppery grilled skewer that I've always seen done with meat. We ended up finding a place that did it with salmon, so I was happy to try, and it was quite good, especially with some jollof!

I had a few Peruvian dishes for the first time. Not a fan of the toasted corn in their ceviche! I guess they like the texture contrast, but I don't want mine to be that crunchy, thanks 😐. I still loved it otherwise. I really liked the chupe de camarones I had too, lovely soup. This probably looks most similar to the one I had. I also tried arroz chaufa but that was just alright... it just kinda seemed like mushy fried rice. Might have just been the one I had though.

In the last quarter of 2025 I got back into the groove of real cooking. At one point I'd made a big batch of chana masala and jeera aloo and begrudgingly ate it with rice, because I hadn't found the heat-and-eat paratha I had in mind at any stores nearby. It took me a whole three days to finally realize I could just make some myself - duh! I had to improvise some baking powder (because I had my bright idea in the middle of the night when shops were closed) and substitute a cast-iron skillet for a griddle/tawa, but the final product was actually very good, regardless of it being my first ever attempt at it. It's really too simple to boast about, but I was still quite pleased!

The best thing I had overall was probably an old favorite - salmon pad kra pao from a restaurant about 20 mins away. I could probably eat just Thai food for the rest of my life and not get tired of it... I just never know which spelling/romanization to use for the dishes.

Over the last year, I've finally gotten into the regular habit of making chicken stock and beef stock/modern demi glace. Picked up a chinois and a big stock pot from a restaurant supply store. After 4 batches they've already paid for themselves. My soups and sauces taste worlds better all the time in a way that my guests aren't usually able to describe!

Thanks to the generosity of a Tildes friend, I learned how to make a delicious plum cake. To make it, you make a cake batter to specifications, then add a layer of sliced plums, then add a struesel topping, basically chopped nuts, butter, sugar and spices. The taste is amazing. Im looking forward to next summer when plums will be available again.

So weirdly the most incredible dish I have ate this year was a noodle salad hidden away at the Aunt Cass Cafe in Disney California Adventure. And I mean hidden. I went into the cafe looking for it and I didn’t see it on the menu. I only found it on the app.

It was kind of like a Vietnamese vermicelli bowl with the bunches of different vegetables, but it was with Japanese soba noodles, had a really delicious sesame ginger sauce, and had a generous helping of marinated tofu.

At the beginning of the month I went on a cruise to get what should have been the best food of the year but instead the main dining room gave me “crispy tofu tacos”, which were neither tacos nor crispy tofu. It was a tiny bit of cold fried tofu put in a fried tortilla bowl, next to another fried tortilla bowl filled with tortilla chips, served with the smallest imaginable serving of peanut satay sauce. Did I mention this was Mexican night? When the server asked me what was wrong with my food I literally didn’t know where to begin. On the plus side I tried Sambucca for the first time and it’s a new favorite.