Happy New Year! 2024 was a busy year as new challenges and adjustments were at the forefront. I’ve been active on Yelp writing restaurant reviews and hitting up hard to get into restaurants. I’m still struggling with Meta, which consists of Facebook and Instagram. This time it’s spammers who wanted to steal my content. I know it’s a very competitive market out there. So, if anyone out there can provide input to help improve this account, that would be great.

Since this is the middle of the week, I began the game plan last night on New Years Eve 2024 with my traditional lucky foods menu. Thanks to Whole Foods and Lidl, I was able to achieve that.  To start, I had my traditional 12 fruits, which I was able to obtain:

Oranges, blueberries, avocado, apple, pear, strawberries, grapes, raspberries, Kiwi, mango, lemon, and lime. That turned out I had 13, well, to be fair. I had 12 pairs of fruits and 1 banana.

For my meals, I search recipes online to find inspiration with the ingredients I had to work with.  So I made the following:

• Cornbread with bacon and swiss cheese,
• Biko – glutinous sweet sticky rice with brown sugar, coconut milk and vanilla
• Sauteed collard greens in bacon fat
• Honey Chili Crunch Salmon
• Boiled Soba Noodles
• Madras lentils

Today, the celebration continues with consuming leftovers and cooking the remaining soba noodles with mushroom and kale.

Check out my posts on Instagram at @tablespoonsandteaspoons. Stay tuned for an exciting 2025.