component cooking: open-ended ingredients for flexible (lazy?) dinner planning

work smarter, not harder 🤓

Component cooking is what I like to think of as creating your next meal one ingredient at a time. Ingredients are the building blocks of a recipe, but do they all have to be cooked at the same time? That’s a big fat no from me, dawg. 

I think what can make many shy away from their kitchens is following a recipe. Recipes come from all sorts of sources with a wide range in experience. They also differ in language, sometimes relying too much on the user to interpret and understand without explicit instructions. Pictures can be helpful, but can also impede on the experience of using your best reading comprehension skills and paying attention in a more hands-on way to the sounds and smells described in text-only recipe directions. Simply put, the way a recipe is written and published is dependent on the target audience.

My experience lies in home cooking, making everything and anything that caught my eye (and the imagination of my tastebuds) to be potentially delicious. It took many years of doing that, but eventually I felt comfortable enough to completely wing it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and then eventually write my own recipes. When making a recipe from a cookbook written by one celebrity chef or another, you’re unknowingly having that recipe work against you — at home, you do not have access to all of the tools, appliances, experience, education, and sometimes ingredients that someone in a restaurant kitchen has readily available. That said, I have had some great experiences making celebrity chef recipes in my home (the 12+ hours that it took to make the Momofuku ramen broth was well worth it, a real stunner).

Then there are all of the tasks required before you even make a recipe. You have to :

• find the recipe

• look through your fridge and pantry for the ingredients

• add the items that you need to your grocery list

• go to the grocery store

• pick a date that theoretically works with your schedule

• have the flexibility to shift to another night without creating food waste

It can be incredibly intimidating and disappointing to read through a recipe and realize that you don’t have the tools or ingredients, or that there’s just not enough time or bandwidth to make it. It’s a lot of mental gymnastics, and we can’t be Simone Biles all the time in the kitchen. (I think Simone Biles would even agree with that.)

suddenly going into mental gymnastics boss mode

When you’re living a busy life, adding more time management to your day sounds like the worst idea ever. And at the end of the day, at that. One realization that I came to recently, when it came to cooking without a recipe, was that you can cut out a whole lot of active cooking time when you make some of the elements ahead of time. (And this is not meal prepping. I have a major dislike for meal prepping, it just kind of grosses me out to think of 5 days’ worth of the same meal sitting in their individual containers, getting slimy and doing weird fermenting things that they shouldn’t be doing come Friday 🤢 Not soup, I’m talking like a chicken breast, broccoli, and rice set-up.) 

What I’m talking about here today can fix that problem and add some flexibility into your weeknight dinners. If you consistently have several of these basic components on hand, your ability to throw dinner together lickety-split will suddenly increase. The directions you can go in, the mileage that each item can get you — it feels amazing to know that you can just see what feels right in the moment and it’s going to be delicious. It’s just one lightbulb moment after another.

Below, I’ll be listing my favorites and ways to use them. I got strategies, y’all. All of these items are either in the “open-ended / blank slate” category or in the “ready-to-go, just add x, y, z” category.