Dish of the Month – NOMINATIONS, January 2021

Welcome to the Nominations thread for the January 2021 Dish of the Month. For those unfamiliar with the Home Cooking Dish of the Month (“DOTM”), our community selects a particular dish for each month. Over the course of that month Hounds cook the dish and report on the results, as well as exchanging comments and tips as we perfect those results. The purpose of this thread is to collect ideas of a “dish” (defined below) that we will be cooking in January.

During December we’ve been making Mole, as reported here, https://www.chowhound.com/post/mole-d... . There are still 11 days remaining in December so, if you can fit Mole into your year-end plans – maybe for Boxing Day or New Years Eve? -- please make Mole and report about it on that thread.

What should we cook during January 2021? Let’s factor in that we are entering month 11 of the pandemic. Many of us have home-cooking fatigue (at least I do), which is exacerbated because we almost always are cooking for the entire nuclear family. There’s not much opportunity to reserve cooking a DOTM for when a meat-and-potatoes spouse is traveling or picky child is sleeping over at a friend’s house. Regardless, let’s stick to DOTM’s spirit of trying to push our collective envelopes, but let’s also be mindful of the stresses of pandemic home-cooking in the dishes that we nominate.

**What Makes a Dish**
A dish is loosely defined as an ingredient and a method of preparation. “Chocolate” or “beef” are not dishes. “Chocolate mousse” or “beef stew” are. You don’t have to be terribly specific; you can just nominate “tomato soup,” without describing the details of how it is prepared (e.g., “tomatoes chopped and simmered over low heat then puréed and poured into a bowl”). For some dishes, both the ingredients and the technique are implied, such as cassoulet or jambalaya.

** Please Don’t Nominate Dishes that already have been Prior DOTM Dishes**
The Home Cooking DOTM series has been running since August 2012. Over that period, we’ve already cooked approximately 100 different dishes, as listed on this index, https://www.chowhound.com/post/links-.... We want to avoid selecting a dish for January that is a repeat of a dish done before so please review the index before nominating a dish. You are invited to make any of the prior DOTMs and contribute to the existing threads for them at any time.

**How to Nominate or Second a Dish**
When you are ready to nominate a dish, or to second another’s nomination, please type the dish in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Nominations are counted by how many times they are written in capitals, so if you’re discussing a dish without nominating, or after nominating, please type it in lower case. Each Hound may nominate as many dishes as he/she likes during the Nomination phase of our selection process.

Nominations will be open until Saturday, December 26, 2020 at 9:00 p.m. EDT (6:00 pm PDT and 1:00 am on 12/27/20 GMT). After the nominations close, the dishes with the most nominations will move on to the voting thread where every person gets only one vote. Once the votes are tallied, the winning dish will be announced and there will be a thread where everyone can post reports and photos.