365 IN 365 - Welcome to My Ingredients-Only Household

Jennifer Armstrong is the creator of this series of posts, published bi-monthly, entitled 365 in 365. These posts will help guide us all as we accept the 6D opportunity to diversify our plants in order to nurture and nourish our microbiome and thus improve our health and wellness. You can join us for this year-long event (on facebook only) CLICKING HERE AND JOINING THE GROUP!

I learned the term “Ingredients-Only Household” when my daughter and her boyfriend came home from NYC for Thanksgiving last year. I have since learned that this is sometimes a disparaging term on social media, but because they are both vegan chefs (they met working in the kitchen of a well-known vegan restaurant) this was a good thing, not the cause for alarm and despair you see illustrated by TikTok reels of people asking desperately where the snacks are. They sat down and made a long list of all the things they would need to cook our Thanksgiving dinner. Everything on the list was in the kitchen already.

Aside from fresh fruit and vegetables, just about everything a plant-based cook needs can happily sit on a pantry shelf, and if, like me, you dislike running to the store for one thing called for by a recipe, you can have literally everything a plant-based cook needs in the pantry, or the freezer, or the fridge!

My kitchen did not start out like this, but when I eliminated packaged and most processed food from my diet, this was the inevitable result. If I want to eat falafel, I will need to have chickpeas and dried parsley on hand. If I want chili, I need kidney beans and canned tomatoes and frozen peppers. If I want to make a salad dressing, I need to have tahini and vinegar in the cupboard.  It is all ingredients, and because I have made a deliberate effort to diversify and expand the number of plants I eat, this means a loooong list of ingredients in my ingredients-only kitchen.

To corral all these ingredients into rational order, I have largely bought in bulk (which does not have to mean a large quantity) and decanted everything into labeled jars of the same size that I put into alphabetical rank and file.  Yes, there is a start-up cost of time and effort, but it pays off in the end when I can see in a moment if I have both baking powder and dried cranberries, both nutritional yeast and wild rice, instead of digging around in the pantry among different kinds of packages.

Food packaging is meant to be eye-catching on the grocery store shelf, but a pantry full of colorful boxes and bags and cans and jars in different sizes and shapes with fonts and graphics of every description is my idea of chaos.  So, uniformity is the key for me. Some ingredients are kept in cold storage, and my refrigerator is similarly full of labeled jars of nuts and seeds. I use wide-mouth quart Ball canning jars with plastic lids, but I’m sure there are other solutions. I am not doing it for Instagram; I am doing it for convenience.

I sometimes think of my kitchen as a witch’s cottage, except instead of jars labeled “Eye of Newt” and “Spiders’ Eggs”, the jars are labeled “Lentils - Red,” “Lentils - Black,” “Lentils - Green” and “Hibiscus,” “Chamomile,” and “Lemon Balm.” No mystery potions here, just a cornucopia of plants. 

Part of my instinct for having an ingredients kitchen is that I am an intuitive cook. I do have cookbooks, and I do watch YouTube videos of plant-based cooks. But more often than not I am learning method or technique rather than recipes. This way I can respond to whatever my garden is offering, or what I can get at the Farmer’s Market or what looks good at the supermarket.  A technique for building a salad dressing is more useful, I think, than a recipe. The general method for making hummus is more flexible than a recipe: no chickpeas on hand? Well, I can use butter beans instead.  Being an intuitive cook means getting familiar with the essential nature of your ingredients - these ingredients provide creaminess, these add umami, these add tang or saltiness, these freshness and herbaceous notes, these heat, these body or chew or crunch.  With a kitchen full of ingredients and a general idea of methods, I can make just about anything.

A cursory count of the plant ingredients in my kitchen is well over 100. There are dried herbs and spices, dried legumes, whole grains, dehydrated fruits, vegetables, seaweeds,

and mushrooms. There are raw nuts and seeds, freeze-dried edamame and puffed quinoa. There are fresh onions and oranges and carrots and kale in the fridge, along with lemon juice and maple syrup and miso and ferments.  If I were to dive into my big freezer, I would lay my hands on even more, since that is where I will find what remains of last summer’s harvest of blueberries and Brussels sprouts and radicchio and corn, tomatoes and peaches and pole beans.

If I am trying to get to 365 plants in 365 days, I am already well on my way.  And these are just plant foods in my regular rotation -  as the gardening season bursts open before us, a glorious bounty of other plants will become available, ready to be combined in an infinite number of ways with all the ingredients already on hand. Specialty markets, both on line and brick and mortar, invite experimenting with unfamiliar plant foods to round out the list.

If you follow a WFPB lifestyle, chances are you have an ingredients kitchen to some degree, too. Embrace the diversity! Count up how many plant foods you have in your kitchen already – it is probably more than you realize. Then branch out from there – there is a world of ingredients waiting for you: at least 365! This series of blogs will be a jumping off point for us all to increase the diversity of our ingredients, whether you have an ingredients-only kitchen or not.

About Jennifer Armstrong

Jennifer Armstrong has spent her life making things; she has had a long career of writing books for children, decades of gardening, painting, making music, and cooking. A 2023 graduate of the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies course in Plant- Based Nutrition, she has also combined her interest in sustainability with her love of food by learning how to can and dehydrate, saving as much of the local harvest as possible for use throughout the year.  She lives in upstate New York.

Jennifer is both a blog writer and event moderator at 6D Living. Her blog post series 365 in 365 will explore how we can all diversify and improve our microbiome. Jennifer is also an administrator for our public, world-wide event of the same name. This free event is a year long community activity with one goal only - get more people on the planet a wider variety of plants.

About our 6D Community Activity - 365 in 365

This is a 365 day challenge to try 365 different plants in your nutritional routine over the next 365 days. We will explore new and known plants, share their nutritional benefits as well as recipes so we can all enjoy the splendor of the plant world and improve our health - as a united community.

We know that the diversity of plants we eat determines our microbiome health, which in turn determines our overall health and wellness. Our goal at 365 in 365 is to try to get as many different plants as possible into our bodies over the year - steadily becoming healthier together.

We invite all our members to share recipes, new plants they have 'discovered' for themselves as well as resources where we can all find these wonderful gifts from nature no matter where we live in the world.

This is an international plant-based community for curious minds which want to learn how to be healthier, happier and more balanced in their lives. This is a group of hope and encouragement for all sentient beings on the planet we call home. This activity/event is only taking place on facebook, apologies to all who are not on that platform.

Be well

Stop.Breathe.Focus.Move.Flow.