Dinner, 2013

Last year, I blogged my dinner almost every day - not quite, of course, as I didn't blog leftovers or when we went out, etc. But I did blog most of the meals I cooked - especially those where I tried a new recipe.

I do not intend to do the same in 2013 (far too much effort, for one thing) but I will blog interesting food and I will keep track again, which I really enjoyed doing. I also enjoyed being able to disprove common dinner misconceptions ("We have this all the time."  "We never have such and such."  "Why don't you ever make such and such?"  "Why do you always force us to eat aubergines?") - I could dig out my notebook and say "Actually, we haven't had this in 3 months".  It was also nice to keep track of stuff we really liked so we can go back to it ("What was that really nice thing we had with chicken and mango?")

I also have all kinds of geeky dinner statistics I could produce now. I won't produce them all, but here are some approximate facts & figures:

In 2013:

• We ate approximately 110 vegetarian meals at home - an average of 9 a month.  Further meals might have involved fish or seafood, or a small amount of meat (as opposed to meat as a main ingredient - e.g. a pumpkin soup with some crispy chorizo on top)
• We ate out or had takeaway approximately 23 times - an average of twice a month. This includes when on holiday or eating at friends' house/going to parties. We don't do a lot of eating out!
• We had leftovers approximately 26 times. Again, only an average of twice a month. This doesn't count when we use a leftover ingredient to make a new meal (e.g. turkey curry on the day after Boxing Day) but does include things from the freezer, like soup or spaghetti bolognese.  Lots of small amounts of leftovers were eaten for lunches, also!
• There were 6-10 days when people just had to sort their own dinner out - "fend for yourself" days - usually if one or more people were going out and dinner was complicated.  This often entails things like scrambled eggs, souper noodles, cereal, a bagel, tinned soup, etc.
• Sarah cooked entirely on her own 7 or 8 times - not counting jacket potato nights. This is something she started doing in September, when our Thursday nights became really busy.
• I didn't keep track of how many times Geoff cooked, but there were probably a dozen or so - next year, I'll be sure to keep a note, so he can get the credit he deserves!

So, there's more than you ever wanted to know about our dinners in 2012. May 2013 prove interesting as well!