2024: Another Year in Food

This time with more children, worse pictures, and fewer ambitions…

Yet another year over, and dozens more recipes in the books. Despite adding another baby to the mix with John John and watching Morgan turn into an…opinionated eater, we managed to work through meals as simple as bulk pasta sauce to as complicated as bulk pasta sauce. The months in between were filled with a ton of fresh ingredients thanks to our new garden beds and few more exploratory bets across the protein spectrum.

Like last year, this is both a recap of what was cooked and a celebration of the previous year. I’m also introducing an exciting new section called “Things My Toddler Ate,” capturing the many moments when our unhinged psychopath ate and wore new and exciting foods.

My Name Is Beef

While we ordered a quarter cow in late 2024, it didn’t show up until 2025. However, we didn’t let that stop us, and kept a regular focus on preparing more and more diverse beef-focused dishes. The year started with breaking down discount Choice Rib and ended fittingly with breaking down very much not discount Prime Rib.

Christmas Opulence

TL;DR we bought a massive 13lb prime rib roast to end the year, breaking it up into two roasts with two different cooking methods. To give people options, we cooked one roast traditionally with a basic rub sitting on an inverted rib rack, and the other with a mustard-forward rub and the ribs covering the fat cap to promote wall-to-wall medium-rare. Both ended up amazing, so much so that we failed to get a single picture of either sliced!

New Year’s Discount Roast

By far one of the best deals in cooking occurs annually roughly between December 26th and April 20th or so. All of the prime rib and “prime rib” roasts from the holidays go on sale, often for literally pennies on the dollar. If you have storage space and some patience, it’s a great time to snag bulk rib roast on the cheap. We snagged a few such “choice rib” roasts, which usually consist of 3-4 bone sections of meat. You can butcher these down easily and vacuum seal them for later, scoring really good ribeye for literally $4-$6 a pound.

Celebratory Tartare

Steak tartare is one of those must-do dishes that makes for a perfect meal or ludicrous appetizer. While simple to make - basically just a mix of raw steak, egg, mustard, worcestershire sauce, and capers - tartare just has a presence to it that makes it feel decadent. The main trick is to freeze your steak before slicing, as you can cut it into smaller pieces without fighting the muscle or warming it up too much.

Long Cook, Short Ribs

Just like last year, we broke out beef short ribs several times in 2024, both for friends/family and just because they are still SO good. We still cook ours down over several hours with a sauce of garlic, onions, a decent Italian red, beef stock, and butter, and now just serve with mashed potatoes, broccolini or asparagus, and gluten free biscuits. I cannot overstate how wonderful these are for how little work they take. The only major con is that Costco no longer carries true bone in short ribs (just Flanken style) meaning you’re on the hunt for pricey versions at Sprouts or similar.

Fresh from the Garden

We finally got our long-planned raised bed garden in place last year! The subject of a future blog, the garden proved immensely productive, yielding a horrifying several dozen pounds of basil, parsley, tomatoes, sage, pumpkins, and more. We are still reaping the benefits of last year’s production with about a dozen more meals’ worth of pesto remaining. Thank you to everyone who adopted a bundle of parsley or cubes of pesto.

Abundance

I grew up gardening and I’m used to blowout harvests. Last year was easily 10x more than that and became a crisis around September. We ended up with literally dozens of pounds of herbs, with easily 50 bundles of parsley, basil, and sage. The piles got so large that we had to bribe friends and family to take raw herbs, and even tried donating them to local restaurants. Something about the combination of seed, soil, and sun was ideal for explosive growth despite harvesting weekly over the summer.

We had to find some way to preserve all of these herbs, and ended up focused on chimichurri and pesto. Pesto was the main hit - we went through around 10lb of pine nuts to create enough pesto to make you hate it. Anyone who asked (or stupidly came by the house) ended up with 2-3 meals worth of it, and we are still sitting on easily 6–8 more full servings for a family. After all of that pesto, we still had to give out easily 10lb of fresh basil.

Quality, Not Quantity

Despite the dream basil harvest, we also experienced a phenomenally low yield of pumpkins, cucumbers, and eggplant. Likely due to too much sun/too much powdery mildew, we ended up fighting for our lives to bring in a small handful of food.

Our main victory was finally pulling off Jack-o’-lantern pumpkins in Colorado’s very short growing season! Four pumpkins made it (lovingly called Dada, Momma, Morgan, and John John by Morgan) with constant milk baths to fight mildew. We let them go as long as we could before a true 15° frost claimed the whole garden.

We’ve learned a lot for next year, namely moving around a few beds to optimize for sun-friendly produce. Expect another wave of far too much fresh produce coming to a guilt-ridden text message near you!

Bulking Up

We did welcome another baby in 2024, which meant time to cook was surprisingly limited. To prepare, we went a hair crazy with the food prep, even running into multiple recalls via contaminated eggs and chicken. Still, we powered through, and ended up with a freezer full of pesto, pasta sauce, butter chicken, and more. While last year had more hits, this year focused more on consistency. We started with the aforementioned ribeye…

…before making another massive batch of Cornell chicken.

DID I MENTION PESTO

We made truly shocking and horrifying volumes of pesto. Whatever you’re thinking, quadruple it. We filled up 5-6 4L prep containers with pesto only using homegrown basil. The main trick is to quickly blanch the basil leaves if you intend to freeze the pesto - the process preserves the green color without sacrificing any flavor. We use big whiskey ice molds to freeze the pesto and cover with a light layer of olive oil to reduce freezer burn impact. This holds for easily 3-4 months without issue.

Peach for the Stars

My stupid self wandered over to local produce vendor Spencer’s to “accidentally” find their 2nds bin. This is a pile of boxes of fresh fruit that failed to meet “1sts” standards, usually fruit with bruises, unsightly dents, or other battle wounds. You know, jam fodder.

What resulted was an epic battle to break down ~100lb of peaches before they rotted, and canning about half of that. We wound up giving out a few dozen jars of preserves, as well as making peach ice cream and pancakes. The battle against the gnats was so fierce that we didn’t even capture a picture of all of the jars.

Things My Toddler Ate

Who doesn’t love a run of toddlers eating like loons? In true fashion, Morgan delivered some hits this year including:

A (very safe) Dark Knight tribute.

Oatmeal with a record four spoons.

The largest “pantake.”

A raw lemon.

Misc

We cooked a lot that didn’t make a category but still get a mention. This ranges from staples to Instagram meme meals.

Cream Poached Salmon

This was an Instagram rip that blends leeks, spinach, salmon, cream, and more into a now-favorite poached salmon recipe. The result is a really delicate salmon with a rich and interesting sauce. Easy for a weekday, but easily classed up for a special occasion.

Even More Bacon

We started the year with another 10lb slab of bacon and didn’t look back. This year, I returned to fresh juniper berries, and I think it makes all the difference. A few handfuls gives the bacon a spruce flavor that just takes it to another level.

Gluten Free “Pizza”

With gluten free friends and family, I’ve had to spend a lot of time finding good gluten free alternatives to foods like bread and pizza dough. We’ve become big fans of Caputo’s FioreGlut, a deglutenized flour that makes for truly close to normal baked goods. The resulting pizzas are close enough to regular Neapolitan equivalents to feel right while having so little gluten as to not trigger a celiac.

Like before, here’s to another year of food down, and another exciting one already underway! Just so far in 2025, we’ve already nailed gluten free sourdough, finally received our quarter cow, and even prepared Duck a l’Orange!