Favorite, Single Ingredient

So many ingredients to choose from

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Have you ever thought about what your favorite, single ingredient to cook with is? “But there are so many that I love, I couldn’t possibly choose just one!”. I do not particularly disagree with you, but I do think there is great benefit to giving this some thought.

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First, the point of this question is not to force you to pick just one, but to help you thinking about what is or has become essential to you since we began our culinary journey. Be sure that the further down this path you are, answering this question will become less challenging and more pleasurable. There will most likely be a period in between where you are experiencing so many new tastes that you will be completely overwhelmed by this question and refuse to give it much time.

The second reason to go through this exercise is to keep tabs on what you have on hand. This way you can make sure you have enough in the pantry and panic someday when you find any in the middle of making that dish that just isn’t the same without it.

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The third benefit of giving this some thought is it can be inspiration to combine some of your favorite ingredients in a different way than the “usual” or your go to recipes. And boom! You have created you own recipe!!! Now you are becoming engaged in the creative process of cooking. It is the art of cooking where anything is fair game, and it is up to you as the artist to bring all the different components together, creating something wonderful!

What is my favorite ingredient? Mushrooms, hands down without a doubt. In fact, as I am writing this, I have come up with an idea for a new way to use it, well new for me, that I will share later in this post. I hope this helps illustrates how going through this process can stimulate your creativity and be the catalyst of your own epiphany.

This is the epiphany that I experienced as I was writing this post. I remember one day when we were having oatmeal, my sister and I commented on how my mother was eating it. She didn’t put anything sweet in hers. Instead, she ate it simply with salt and butter. When we questioned why she was eating it this way she told us that when she was growing up, they ate oatmeal and porridge as a savory dish rather than more like a dessert.

In the Iranian cuisine there is a soup called Ashe jow, made of barley, meat, herbs, and other ingredients. It is obviously savory and, while it is technically a soup, it is very thick and much more like a porridge. It isn’t oatmeal but the barley is very similar.

I haven’t decided if I would sauté the mushrooms first or cook them in water and infuse it to cook the oatmeal to bring another component of the mushrooms to the dish. Nor have I figured out much more than that I would use garlic as a part of the recipe. I may even replace the oatmeal with barley. But now I have an idea to pursue and I just need to give it more thought and experiment with what works.

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My intention here is not to write an entire, untried recipe but to demonstrate one way we gain insights to new ways of using something in our cooking. This does not necessarily have to be a complete recipe. It can be something you add or change in an existing recipe or, as I am experiencing, the start of either coming up with my own way of doing this or finding a recipe that fulfills my purpose. This is but one method of to find inspiration. There are many others including cookbooks, cooking shows, reading recipes and blogs on the internet to name a few. 

Back to the subject at hand, your favorite ingredient, or mine. After mushrooms I would tend to say garlic. It is an essential part of so much of what I cook. I love the flavor of it, even as a child garlic bagels were one of my favorites. Sauté almost any vegetable with garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper and you have a great side with little effort. Throw in some mushrooms and you have complete bliss. For me at least. Many chefs often say simple is better.

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I hope you have enjoyed this little excursion and I didn’t make you work too hard. I think you will be rewarded for your effort. There is a world full of fantastic ingredients out there and most of us will probably never experience them all, but we can try. However, those that we do get to enjoy can serve to expand the universe of our kitchens and dining tables. They can open new possibilities if we give some time and thought to them and how they can enhance our culinary joy and creativity.