Later On

My recipes (the ones I make up myself, from what’s on hand) will occasionally include some exotic ingredient—goat butter springs to mind, but I’m sure there are others.

Keep in mind that I am making dishes from what I have on hand. The exotic ingredients are in my kitchen generally not because I got them for a recipe but because I thought they sounded interesting, so I got them and then simply use them in whatever I’m cooking. Then, when I blog the recipe, it looks as though I sought out an elusive, rare ingredient, when in fact I just stumbled across it in the store and brought it home to try—and trying it means using it in cooking, where it then appears in the recipe like a pearl among pebbles.

But the rarest of ingredients generally falls into a common category: a fat (goat butter), an herb (dried lavender), a starch (purple fingerling potatoes), a vegetable (bitter melon), a meat (squab), and so on. And you make a dish using the rare ingredient in its logical role (as oil, herb, starch, vegetable, meat, whatever).

That is, the ingredient comes first and then, once it’s on hand, I think up how to use it.

Of course, it sometimes works the other way around: I see a recipe that calls for a rare (or simply new to me) ingredient, decide I want to make it, and seek out the ingredient. But I like the other way—stumbling across some new food, then bringing it home and using it—better: much easier.

I encourage you to keep your eye out for unusual foods—that is, foods you’ve not had (a food unusual to you or me is likely to be the daily diet of some)—and when you find one, buy it, bring it home, and make a dish that uses it. Google is a tremendous help here, or you can just cook by analogy: purple fingerling potatoes are going to be cooked and consumed like any other potato, right? You know how to cook and how to eat them, so let’s have some. And then when you blog “Purple fingerling potatoes with goat butter” people will assume you’ve spent hours tracking those down instead of simply using what’s on hand.