No-Cook Cooking: Take stock of your year of pandemic perseverance | Food & Cooking

So much has changed since then.

With vaccines gradually becoming available to health care workers and nursing home residents, hopes are rising for a time when bumping into friends in a crowded bar won’t strike fear in a stressed-out heart. But there’s always the temptation to slip right back into old habits. Once it’s OK to go back to packed restaurants someday the way we used to, will we give up on the months of toil invested in learning to cook for ourselves at home?

If you’re making some New Year’s resolutions, consider what 2020 meant to you in terms of cooking, eating and perseverance. Your buying and dining habits may be quite different than they were as you approached New Year’s Eve last year.

Be proud of the times during the lockdown when you turned lemons into lemonade and rotten apples into applesauce, as the old sayings go — and be kind to yourself about the times you got sick of lemonade and applesauce. Stay vigilant in terms of your COVID-19 protection practices, stay safe — and stay proud of yourself.

Here are a few ideas for taking your pandemic pantry lessons forward into a mindful, bold and delicious new year.

Respect your resilienceShopping became surreal when you faced empty shelves in the grocery stores during 2020. Not just milk-and-bread snowfall bare, but strike-out-at-three-stores bare. And in the process, you learned not to buy things you’d never eat out of fear that your favorite foods were gone forever.