Are you good at following recipes but wish you had the knack for just throwing together a meal from ingredients you happen to have? The way I got started on developing that knack was to learn to make a basic sauce from scratch. Over at Kitchen Stewardship, I explain how to learn 4 sauces and how to use them:
- Marinara sauce for Italian pasta dishes
- Teriyaki sauce for stir-fry or salad
- Herby olive oil sauce for awesome vegan food that’ll satisfy chicken cravings
- Spicy peanut sauce for Thai-style noodle/rice bowls
All of them are flexible, easy to customize to your taste. Two of them are ready in 5 minutes or less. They’ll save you a lot of money, compared to buying ready-to-use sauces in bottles, and they may be healthier!
Here is a recent meal I made with the teriyaki sauce. (Food styling and photography by Nicholas Efran.) We had a cauliflower from our farm share, complete with all its leaves, and I stir-fried both the flower and the leaves while marinating tofu in the sauce, then added the tofu and sauce to the wok and cooked until bubbly. Delicious!
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The Earthling's Handbook 
It’s wonderful to have some go-to sauce recipes you can make anytime. I had a look at the recipes and they all look fantastic. I love how they are customisable, and also how you don’t have to worry about exact measurements! Thank you for sharing with us at Hearth and Soul and for mentioning us in your post. Hope to ‘see’ you again this week!