It’s been years since I last wrote anything substantial on here, but I decided on a whim that 2021 would be the year I revived this neglected corner of the food internet. I wish I could claim that such a decision was the result of an inspirational bolt from the blue, or a wholesome desire to do more things that I enjoy as a result of the miserable devastation wreaked by 2020…but the honest truth is that I had to pay 155 dollars to Squarespace for the privilege of reinstating my expired domain, and I’ll be damned if I let that money go to waste. I will chain myself to this desk and churn out post after post until I feel some arbitrary sense of having gotten ‘good value for money’. Welcome to 2021 on Nutmegs, seven: powered by stubbornness, excessive thriftiness and a vague, directionless sense of spite. It’ll still be an improvement on 2020.

That auspicious transitional period between the years has arrived, and with it the impulse to invent unattainable goals as a coping mechanism, to quell the anxieties of liminality and assert some control over the unnerving blank space that is ‘2017’. While I will not be treading the same path as my friend’s husband, who last year decided that his new year’s resolution was simply and decisively ‘to be better’, it strikes me that using this threshold period as a time to consider ways of improving the year ahead is no bad thing. It’ll take more than a few facile resolutions to tackle the quagmire of misery, post-truth and political turmoil that was 2016, so let’s turn our attention instead to the more manageable, the smaller but still significant: our appetites; the food on our plates; how we eat. Since my life, and my years, are inevitably mapped out around the intricacies of food and cooking, it struck me that there are a few issues we food bloggers, writers, chefs and cooks may want to consider over the coming 365 days in order, ahem, ‘to be better’.