2. LARDER

Week 2: Key Takeaways

Getting to know and love your larder, and maintaining it well (more or less!) means delicious food always

  • Your personal preferences are the perfect place to start and you can expand from there

  • We break the larder down into broad categories and you can start to think about exploring, structuring and expanding it along those themes

  • With all of these ingredient tutorials, if you can't come up with an objective description for how something tastes or smells, come up with a personal one

    • What matters is that you start to identify and associate flavours and feelings so that you don't need to rely on being told what to do by a recipe

  • My larder, especially my ‘personal’ one is not exhaustive. But it is pretty comprehensive, and covers a lot of flavour profiles and moods

    • The majority of what I eat on an everyday basis uses these larder ingredients

    • If you’re not sure where to start, focus on the things in my larder you think you like or want to cook with

    • I use some more than others, and yes there are many other things in my broader larder that I use less frequently. This reflects my own relationship with food and so your larder may look quite different to mine...culture, preferences, personal taste, intuition, magic, who knows what!

Spices and dried herbs: mainly spices as I’m not a fan of dried herbs (with a few exceptions). Whole dried spices keep their flavour and freshness for longer, so I favour having those and toasting/grinding as needed. The go-to spices in my intuitive larder comprise:

  • Cumin

  • Coriander

  • Cardamom

  • Cinnamon

  • Dried oregano

  • Cloves

  • Chilli flakes

  • Fennel seeds

  • Whole nutmeg

  • Mustard (fresh, seeds, powder)

  • Sumac

  • Za’atar

  • Spice mixes (e.g. garam masala, dukkah—I usually make my own)

  • Flaked sea salt

  • Whole black peppercorns

  • Dried garlic

  • Onions

Savoury/umami: really useful to add bags of flavour and that savoury hit which is magical with veggies!

  • Soy (or tamari which is also gluten free!)

  • Miso paste (I love white best, but they’re all good, and for different things)

Oils: this is a personal one, the main distinction here being between neutral and flavoured oils. Neutral cooking oils will stand up to heat better, flavoured oils are great for dressings and finishing dishes. Nut and seed oils also taste great and I do use them, probably just not as often as this list of my go-tos:

  • Cold-pressed rapeseed

  • Toasted sesame

  • Extra virgin olive

  • Coconut

Vinegars: There are all sorts of vinegars out there and I encourage you to try a few different ones as your old stocks run out and find out which ones you like. Something I didn’t have on my list but is a vinegar I really love is sherry vinegar. You can also get more interesting vinegars (like coconut, for example):

  • Raw apple cider

  • White wine (or other wine vinegars)

  • Rice

  • Malt

  • Balsamic

Nuts and seeds: a super easy and tasty way to introduce texture, and particularly in paste/butter form, can add real creaminess and richness to your plant-based dishes. If I’m adding nuts and seeds to dishes that are already cooked, I will always toast them (e.g. for salads or topping veggie dishes)—I just don’t think they taste as good or add as much crunch otherwise:

  • Sesame seeds

  • Sunflower seeds

  • Pumpkin seeds

  • Tahini

  • Nut butters (I usually have deep roast peanut which is very distinctive in flavour, and roasted cashew butter which is more neutral)

  • Walnuts

  • Hazelnuts

  • Coconut (desiccated, cream, milk)

Sweeteners: whilst sugar is sugar, less refined versions tend to offer their own unique flavour which can be a welcome addition to a dish as well as offering some sweetness to balance or compliment the other ingredients you are combining:

  • Honey

  • Maple syrup

  • Sugars I particularly like: Golden caster, coconut, light muscovado

Pulses, grains etc: I would definitely encourage you to have these on hand. What I have is 100% reflective of my style of cooking and the sorts of things I like to batch cook and stock my freezer with (dhal, chilli, curry), So I normally keep:

  • Red split lentils, green lentils, mung dal (yellow and green)

  • Black beans and black eyed beans

  • Much pasta! 

  • White and brown basmati rice

  • White quinoa

  • Rice noodles (usually the vermicelli ones), soba noodles, and Vietnamese rice paper wraps (for summer rolls!)

Week 2: Exercises

Explore your larder! Maybe even reorganise it!

  • Don’t organise alphabetically or by date or height or colour… organise intuitively. Oils and vinegars together. Spices together. Sweeteners together

    • Categorising in this way helps you to keep track of what you have, need, are running low on (it's not always possible to have everything arranged so you can see it!)

    • Stops you amassing multiple versions of the same ingredient and encourages you to substitute intuitively—if you run out of honey, might maple syrup work?

    • If it’s easier to find and engage with your larder ingredients, you’re more likely to use them

  • Get your senses involved—open things, smell them, check the texture/consistency, have your spices lost their zing?

    • Take pride in your larder! If something is past its best consider using it up ASAP and getting a fresh version

    • Building on the mindset stuff from last week, explore your connection to things through smells and aromas

      • Do certain ingredients spark memories or evoke emotions? Bank that information, feel it and have faith you’re giving your intuition valuable input to build on as you keep going 

  • Get to grips with what you have and what your different categories look like

    • Do you have ingredients that span all the categories? You don’t have to have everything but if you have a few things across the categories then that’s already going to be massively useful!

    • Are there things you’ve never even opened?

    • Are your spices whole or ground?

    • What do you use most/least/not at all? 

Next time you do a shop…

  • Why not pick up one or two of the things that you don’t have and maybe have resistance to also!

    • Something you think you don’t like or don’t know how to cook with

    • Something you have never used but like the taste of

    • Expanding certain categories where you have few / no items

    • Think about replacing ground spices you have with whole ones when they run out

  • But of course, remember your larder can and will grow organically as you become more curious and adventurous on your intuitive cooking journey

Eat with your larder in mind!

  • Be inquisitive when you taste things you like, people make you food you like, you come across ingredients you don't know

    • It’s as easy as asking a person or google in order to find out what you’re smelling/tasting

    • Remember how much more intuitive our connection becomes when we associate with physical or emotional sensations