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
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.
Eat Breakfast
Amid the ceaseless demands of modern living, breakfast suffers. Two ways to make it easier? Rely on ultrafast dishes and prepare ahead at virtually no expense to your schedule. Sarah DiGregorio’s slow-cooker steel cut oats will burble away as you sleep, ready before you’ve even turned on the coffee pot. In the morning, finish them off with any combination of brown sugar, nuts, honey, fruit, jams or marmalades for a sweet bowl, or tahini, fried shallots, chile crisp, cheese or pickled onions for a savory one.
If sitting down for breakfast just isn’t an option, walking with breakfast still can be. With just 20 minutes on your least demanding day of the week, you can prepare a handful of Yewande Komolafe’s breakfast burritos for the fridge or the freezer, to reheat and hit the road with at your convenience. Hers are meatless as written, filled with cheese, refried black beans, eggs and avocado. But you could easily tuck in a little bacon, if you wish, prepared speedily with the help of Genevieve Ko’s recipe for microwave bacon.
Collection: Breakfasts in 10 minutes or less
Get Great at Meal Prep
Let’s get one thing straight: Success does not lie in a dozen uniform containers filled with the same protein, grain and vegetable. A few batched freezer-friendly recipes are not only easier to cook and store, but also keep you from getting bored with your meals — the greatest threat of the meal prep. A big pot of Eduardo Machado and Michael Domitrovich’s Cuban black beans can be eaten in burritos for breakfast, over rice for lunch and stuffed in sweet potatoes for dinner. Similarly, Dan Pelosi’s chicken pesto meatballs can be prepared in bulk and eaten over pasta one day, in grain bowls the next and tucked into soft rolls another.
Don’t just prep for the week; prep for the months ahead. A big batch of Yewande’s butternut squash soup, cooled and divided into freezer-safe single-serving containers, will be a relief on the days that wash over you, a gift from a past you. That’s the thing about goals: If you account for the times when you might fall short, there’s really no way to fail.
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