Last year I made a post that listed everything I had made in 2024 and ranked them so to continue that tradition, I am doing it again this year.
This year I am changing up how dishes are ranked slightly. Dishes are still ranked on flavor but their ranking might be adjusted based on how healthy something is. This doesn't usually play a factor unless it is an extreme.
Also note that this is purely based on how I cooked each dish. It does not fully represent the recipe or the dish since I might have screwed something up.
Ordering within each rank is arbitrary.
Here is the list:
S - Extremely good; I could eat these all week
- Pho
- Cumin lamb
- Nasi goreng (indonesian version)
- Green beans (with garlic)
- Chicken shawarma
- Taiwanese pork belly with a “Mei cai” twist
A - Very good; Would make again
- Baked salmon with herbs and spices (this one gets an A instead of a B just because it’s healthy and extremely easy)
- Chicken fajitas
- Pad thai
- Garlic eggplant
- Butter chicken (I ended up making several versions of this in 2025, this is just ranking the best version I made)
- Japanese curry
- Teriyaki chicken
- Hot and sour soup (with a mushroom + chicken stock base)
- Braised beef noodle soup
- Nasi goreng kampung (malaysian version)
- Lemongrass pork vermicelli bowl
- Lemongrass chicken vermicelli bowl
- Fuqi feipian (aka thinly sliced beef organ meat with a spicy "dressing") (good but too much effort, I will look for a lower effort version of this recipe if I make this again)
- Kimchi fried rice (various, eg. with spam, chicken breast, broccoli, frozen veggies, etc).
- Kimchi (napa)
- Kimchi (radish)
- Beef broccoli
- Tonkotsu ramen (a huge amount of work)
- Simple broccoli + garlic
- Gobi manchurian cauliflower (it tasted good but it was also a lot of effort)
B - Decent; Would make again
- Kimchi stew (This was an S in 2024 but I think I either got tired of eating it or made it with too much meat)
- Beef tacos
- Mapo tofu
- Spaghetti + meatballs
- Fish sauce chicken wings
- Gong bao ji ding (I like to make this “dry” by limiting the amount of sauces and by cooking on high to dry up the juices)
- Banh mi
- Pork vindaloo (traditional style which is with pork and NO potatoes)
- Regular burgers
- Hot pot
- Oven roasted turkey breast + stuffing
- “Greek style” salad (the usual greek salad ingredients + lettuce + sundried tomato dressing)
- Smash burgers (smash burgers really highlight the beef so it wont taste nearly as good with crappy quality beef and unfortunately I made this with crappy quality beef)
- Simple bok choi + garlic
- “NYT broccoli salad”
- Chinese beef stew
- Pork bone soup
C - Ok; Would probably not make again (at least not for myself)
- biang biang noodles (I used store bought noodles, in order for this to be worth it I think the noodles need to be hand made)
- Chinese style dry pot
- Sundried tomato chicken with orzo (the chicken was horrendous, but the orzo was good)
- Southern style mac & cheese (this is a B taste wise but it's just too unhealthy, I feel like I can't eat too much of this especially now that I know how it's made)
- Chinese cauliflower (the veggie is fine, I think my recipe sucked)
- Greek salad
D - No.
- Pork liver (the organ flavor was way too strong) (should probably try this with chicken liver instead if I decide to run this back)
Overall I think I repeated too many dishes in 2025. For instance I probably made pho for at least 4 different weeks in the year. For 2026 I will be making more of an effort not to repeat any dishes.
As for the best newest dish I learned it has got to go to nasi goreng. Not only is nasi goreng delicious but it's also so versatile, having many many different variations and versions. I will definitely be adding this dish to my rotation.
One other call out I want to make is I got addicted to Greek frappes near the end of the year although I'm not sure if I should list it here.
That's an impressive list. Which dishes would you add to your daily rotation? Basically those dishes that are so simple that you'd cook them in a week day after a long day.
This is a tricky question for me to answer because of how I plan my meals.
I don't usually buy random ingredients and then decide each day what to make with the ingredients. Instead I usually plan 1 or 2 or even 3 things I want to make and then shop specifically based on that.
This has some pros and cons but one large pro is that basically I am fortunate enough to live by several grocery stores that all specialize in different things such as stores that carry more Italian, Japanese, Chinese or Korean ingredients. What I plan to prepare will help me choose which grocery store to go to since I have a rough idea of which key ingredients I can find where. Eg. if I'm planning on making a lot of Japanese curries for the week I am not going to the Italian grocery store or else I'm not going to find my ingredients however I can choose to go to the Chinese, Japanese or Korean grocery stores because the ingredients are general enough that any asian store would have them. But if I needed something really specific such as fresh perilla leaves for something like pork bone soup then I will need to go to the Korean grocery store because it's that specific.
So because of this I don't really have a dish that I just cook whenever I'm lazy because I would have had to shop for it in advance. That being said I do have "emergency rations" in the form of frozen foods or meal kits (Jamaican patties, dumplings, pizza, instant noodles, etc) that I can make in a pinch.
However I do have dishes that I plan to make for the week when I'm lazy because I can make several days of the stuff and basically have no prep time other than microwaving leftovers.
Some examples are:
One pattern you might notice is that all of these meals have both veggies and a protein. This reduces cook time since I don't have to make multiple things. Eg. if I make cumin lamb, I will feel compelled to pair it with a veggie dish as well. More dishes = more cook time.
All that said, I can also come up a different list of examples where I think you can prepare the entire meal in 1h or less from start to finish with cleanup time included
They are:
Basically if you want to reduce cook time significantly, you either need to parallelize and make multiple things at the same time (eg. by baking) or buy premade stuff from the store to skip the prep.
Wow, thanks for such a thorough reply! I should definitely learn some of those dishes. I don't have access to specialized stores, but surely I can get enough spices for making some fried rice dishes.