I just simply can’t believe that it is time to reflect on another year at its end and let me tell you—2022 was a good year for food! There are a lot of great food items to reflect on this year. 2023 will have big shoes to fill!

I just thought it would be fun to reflect and share some of the foods and restaurants we ate at this year, new recipes and techniques I tried this year as well as any fails or misses for the year. I’d love for you to share as many of yours you’d like to as well! It would be so fun to learn more about you and learn what your “bests and worsts” of 2022 were.

Best Meal of 2022

Let’s just start with the highest accolade of the year, shall we? This is a really high honor to give because I am such a foodie and have had many a fine meal this year, thanks to countless hours pouring over Yelp reviews and food blogs :) The honor of this award goes to the overly decadent, best sweet and savory meal combo I’ve ever had the pleasure of trying—the macadamia nut/banana/white chocolate chip pancakes with a side of the best fried rice ever at The Gazebo restaurant in Maui, Hawaii!! Wahoo!! Congratulations, Gazebo, you deserve every ounce of recognition and a million 5 star reviews (which you already nearly have!).

A close second place contender is the mushroom omelet from The Original Pancake House with the thin 49er flapjacks on the side. It looks like it was the year of the breakfast feasts for us at our house. This was definitely the restaurant we frequented the most this year. We created some really fun memories here this year as a family.

Best New Skills of 2022

This year I really tried hard to step out of my comfort zone and try lots of new recipes. I would say a fun focus this year was finding and trying pro tips and techniques with classic recipes. I focused more on making sauces and gravies from scratch with really quality ingredients and my family really enjoyed being the Guinea pigs for all these decadent recipes :)

Best Recipe of the Year

For example, my favorite recipe of the whole year was the beef stroganoff from Natasha’s Kitchen. It has the most divine sauce you make from scratch with plenty of fresh mushrooms and instead of using ground beef, you sear strips of nice steak. It was the most exceptional beef stroganoff I have ever had. All credit goes to Natasha! I was just following a great recipe.

Most Notable Family Food Moment

When I asked my kids their favorite meal of the year they eagerly all exclaimed, “Marie Calender’s Thanksgiving!”. This is so momentous because my kids have never liked the Thanksgiving meal until this year. Not until Marie did the cooking instead of their mother ha! We ordered the full meal with all the fixings this year from the Marie Calender restaurant here and it truly was so delicious! I ended up getting Covid right at Thanksgiving so it ended up being such a blessing in disguise that we had already planned on doing this.

Worst of 2022

I can honestly say that 2022 was thankfully a year without any major cooking catastrophe stories to tell (besides the minor issue of utterly failing the beloved yams recipe for the most important side dish from my husband’s side for one of the only things I did make from scratch for Thanksgiving, but no big deal!).

Take Out

There were a lot of carne asada nachos ordered—in styrofoam containers like this one below. Might not look like the most appetizing thing ever but they hit the spot like nothing else possibly could.

Baking

I watched a lot of baking shows this year, most especially The Great British Bake Off, so I don’t think I gained a whole lot of experience actually baking, but I enjoyed all the heartwarming judging, slap-stick British humor and the tips I learned along the way. Maybe someday I’ll put all the baking shows I watch into practice and actually try something.

Keto

This year my husband and I did keto for a good third of the year, so that was very interesting. There’s one word to tell you how you survive months on the keto diet: bacon. Also, cheese and sausage. Those three things can get you through anything!

I hope you had a wonderful 2022 as well and that it was a year of good food and new recipes and family favorites for years to come. Like I said, please feel free to leave a comment about some of your favorite memories of food this past year. Looking forward to all that 2023 will bring!