I think the secret to keeping one's New Year's resolutions is making the right resolutions. Yesterday Laura and I marched down to Whole Foods and dropped somewhere around $120 in groceries, but I'm willing to bet that we bought enough stuff to keep us in chow for a week or two. Tonight I finally got to try out a recipe I'd had my eye on for months in Jamie Oliver's Jamie's Dinners – his recipe for really good hamburgers.

In true chef fashion we futzed with it a bit, cutting the coriander and cumin and upping the amount of egg (he calls for one egg for eight burgers, and we used one egg for four), topped it with jalapeño jack cheese and some really amazing maple rub bacon, and served it up on toasted buns with buttered green beans and rosemary-and-olive-oil red potato wedges. Beer on the side – Killian's red for her and Samuel Adams for me. We just finished dinner and I'm absolutely stuffed, but if we get the munchies later we still have lemon crumble pie for dessert.

Living that well can not be good for you. I estimate that meal would've run us $40-$50 easy someplace like Applebee's... And it was so much better. Screw eating out – home cooking is so the way to go!

Also of note: for those of you who read this blog through RSS feeds, I've updated the collection of Flickr selections on the side of this page to get a little green back onto these parts. Nothing like the brown, dreary days after the holidays to send a man yearning for the next three months to go flying by... These pics were all grabbed at the Winston Flowers & Garden in Newton, Massachusetts the last time my folks were in town, which was back in September. Someday it'll be green around here again, right?