Hello friend!

To balance out last week’s ridiculously long email, I’m going to keep today’s short and sweet. Let’s discuss one of the MOST important intuitive cooking hacks for making your meals 10X better with a teensy amount of effort…TOPPINGS!

PSA: toppings are not just for pizza or ice cream. Toppings can make ANY meal more delicious, more balanced, and so much more interesting. They are a great way to add variety to your normal go-to’s, using things you already have at home! Plus - they're usually store-bought items and simple additions, so you don't have change anything about your cooking, or cook anything extra to make this delicious improvement to your meals.

What do I mean by a topping? It’s simply a food you add to your meal after it’s been cooked.

I’m guessing you’re already familiar with - and likely already adding - many toppings to your food, such as hot sauce for spice, or fresh herbs for garnish/color, but let me encourage you to EXPAND your toppings game. To help you out in this, I'll explain my general theory when it comes to toppings.

The overall goal is to make your meal more flavorful, interesting, and delicious, which will generally happen when you add CONTRAST with a topping. (I personally love a cold topping on a hot meal for the contrast in temperature as well.)

Contrast looks like…

• for a heavier base/meal, adding a fresh/juicy/acidic topping to lighten it up
• for a lighter meal, adding something umami/creamy/crunchy to bulk it up or add some intensity
• for meals in the middle, you can go in a variety of directions!

Naturally, you can add one or many toppings depending on your liking. I often add between 1-3 toppings, depending on the meal.

The more toppings you keep around, the more variety you can add to your meals while keeping the actual cooking part simple and easy. You can take plain roasted or sauteed veggies in a gazillion directions (and you can "travel" all over the world in terms of taste) simply by adding toppings.

One of the best applications of toppings is this: When I make a big pot of something to eat throughout the week, I change the toppings with each bowl that I eat to make it feel different every time. So for example, if I made a big pot of chili, one day I might top it with sour cream and chopped cilantro; the next bowl I might top with avocado and pickled onions, and the third bowl I might top with coconut yogurt, toasted almonds, and a squeeze of lime. Same base, WAY more interesting to eat all week when you change what’s on top!

When choosing what toppings to add, or how to fill out your pantry/fridge with an interesting variety, I encourage you to think about them in categories of textures. There's a good amount of overlap in the categories here, so think of it as an initial guideline only, but I drew up a little diagram for you with my toppings categories, and then some examples of my own favorites in each category.  

Of course - sauces are also a great topping! But I left them out for today because I always have written about them previously, see emails here and here.