— Geri Ann Laiacona

That's a great question. I love that you're willing to improve on this. so if you it looks like what you used to do is kind of throw everything in together, right? So kind of spanning those out a little bit like the onion is a great example. I'm glad you put that in there. You're gonna get a depth of flavor in that by creating it first with your separate ingredients and going back to the stir fry is probably a good example of this, right? So you want to cook ingredients that take longer put those into the stir fry first. So if you're doing a soup, sometimes you have to do that, but the onion examples wonderful because you'll actually see even if you're not using oil if you're just using water the caramelization starts to happen. So when you put your onions into the pan and you turn on the heat, they naturally start caramelizing releasing some of their natural sugars from that onion, you'll see the Browning start to happen on the bottom of the pan the old the old Chef adage is you never you leave the brown on the bottom of the pain because that's where all the flavor is. That's all that natural caramelization that's happening on the bottom of the pan. So I'll typically Onions and then maybe mushrooms on top of that. I add garlic a little bit later just to make sure it doesn't burn for those things as well too. But depending on the ingredient they're going to have different things that will bring out their full potential of flavor. And onions the caramelization is part of that. So unless you're doing a raw recipe like a pico de gallo or something like that, but that caramelization actually caramelized onions in a pico de gallo is on pretty good too. But if you're doing something like a soup, you know that caramelization is gonna add that extra little bit of flavor to it a little bit of soft sugary from the onion which is wonderful as well. And the mushrooms will actually help it will release a lot of liquid that comes into them and then you can again get that caramelization after the onion or the mushrooms have released a lot of that liquid. So doing different recipes kind of in those orders to be able to make sure you're getting the most out of each ingredient as you go is a wonderful way to cook to get a huge depth of flavor and most of your meals now if it's the end of the week and you've got a fridge full of ingredients you need to just kind of get rid of and do it quickly. It's not the end of the world if you threw it all into a pot with some vegetable stock and made a soup. Are you gonna get the best flavor out of it? You'll probably get a good flavor. But if you use those other techniques and do some caramelization and a little bit more tricks, you actually get a much better depth of flavor from the food about him to add a lot of things like salt, right? So a lot of people have salt addictions, but you're actually cooking properly. You don't need as much salt as most people use or think they need. I hope that helps you.