August is for Ingredients

Too many recipes call for special ingredients that require a grocery trip and added expense. My heart sinks when I look up last minute dinner ideas and realize I am missing a key item which I generally purchase. The new and interesting recipes either never come to fruition, or revert back to the basic meat, grain, vegetable. What are all these cookbooks for if I can’t simply whip up a recipe from my pantry?

I often reflect on some items on the “what you’ll need list” and how they ended up in the kitchen centuries ago. To make a cake for Marie Antoinette, farmers would have had to grow (soft) wheat and other grains, pay a miller to mill the grain, after manually harvesting and purifying. At the millers it would age for a couple of months to dry and whiten before being transferred into sacks (for private millers) or barrels (for commercial millers). All this happens before it ever reaches the counter.

Although I am not interested in pursuing a career in flour production industry, there are other key ingredients that are simple and sometimes cheaper to make at home. Besides cost, there are other reasons you might be interested in making your own ingredients: special or restrictive diets (i.e. clean eating and Whole30, vegan or vegetarian, and allergies to additives), to know or learn the composition of foods, for the experience, to modify or make it your own, in order to limit the quantity of the ingredient or reduce packaging and waste, or even to prepare dishes in the future without running to the store for one item.

For August we are going to focus on some popular, or special, ingredients that pop up in recipes which you can make at home. Never again will you buy a quart of buttermilk only to use 1/2 cup in your pancakes. You will be able to whip these foods up for any opportunity that arises or contrived for spontaneous dinner recipes. Knowing how to turn your more commonplace pantry and refrigerated foods into packaged ingredients will turn challenging or inconvenient recipes into multiple easy meals.