By way of cataloging my journey, I plan to break apart recipes in those three areas: ingredients, methods and techniques.

Ingredients are the physical building blocks of every dish, from the simple peeled orange (Ingredients: 1 orange) to the complex terrine. They are what you’d find listed on the side of a soup can, and I know enough to understand they’re important. I plan to get the best ingredients I can, given time and resources. While this means I won’t be going to the farmer’s markets every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, it does mean I’ll be looking for fresh, local produce when I can, responsibly raised meat and poultry, and smaller, healthier fishes that don’t contain a ton of lead and haven’t been fished to the edge of extinction. (Happy, Bittman?)

Techniques encompass the physical acts and transformations that bring ingredients together. I’m sure there are many who might consider the application of heat itself a technique, but for my exploration, heat will be something else entirely. Again, we can go to the recipe for the simple orange. As I said, the ingredients list would consist of one orange. The technique would be to peel it. My own preferred technique for peeling an orange is to start at the stem end, where the orange was attached to the tree, and press down on the stem button (I have no idea if this is a real name) until the peel breaks, usually in a small semicircle. Then go in with fingers a-blazin’ and release the juicy insides. As I encounter various techniques, I hope to explore them. Where they came from, what they do for food, and how they can be applied across recipes.

When we apply heat to ingredients modified by techniques, we use specific methods. Grilling, frying, sauteing, roasting, baking and others are all methods, and that’s the way I’ll be exploring them. For an orange, there is no method. Peeling is a technique. The method is a null set.

All cooking involves these three components. I hope to be able to expand my cooking knowledge as I explore ingredients, understand techniques and perfect methods to the benefit of the food I make for my family and friends.