My 40 Forever Ingredients

Plus two no-recipe "recipes" to try, using some of my favorite ingredients.

If you’re someone who cooks at home on the regular, you’ll find that, over time, you develop a “forever shopping list” - ingredients that you nearly always have on hand. These are the building blocks of your personal cooking style because they’re well loved, fairly versatile and you know exactly how to use/improvise with them. I know that if I have my “forever ingredients” on hand, I can make any number of unique meals throughout the week.

You may be familiar with New York Times contributor Ali Slagle; she’s a master at dreaming up dinners when you’re otherwise short on time or ingredients (in fact, she wrote a cookbook on this very subject, which I own and enjoy). Ali also writes a very popular Substack newsletter called 40 Ingredients Forever, which dives into this notion of primarily working off a set of roughly 40 “forever ingredients” to cook most of her recipes. It’s one of my favorite reads on this platform, and I especially love when Ali features someone else’s 40 forever ingredients (check out Emily Weinstein’s, Joanna Goddard’s and Hetty McKinnon’s). She then sketches out a few no-recipe recipes using some of those ingredients. It’s fun and inspiring, so I thought I’d share my personal 40 forever ingredients, and a few ideas on what to cook with them. I don’t include salt and black pepper on this list because, duh.