You have roasted barley, an orange bell pepper and a well-stocked pantry. What are you making?
This is a hard mode challenge.
You have roasted barley, an orange bell pepper and a well-stocked pantry. What are you making?
This is a hard mode challenge.
My proposal below for different rulesets depending on how much of a challenge you want.
Hard mode: Only the very basics
Water, table salt, neutral cooking oil, white sugar, white vinegar
Normal mode: Non-perishables only
Dried stuff (beans, white rice, pasta, mushrooms, flour, starches), honey, spirits
Includes the very basics.
Normal mode: Staples only (perishable or non-perishable)
There may be certain items that you would purchase with most grocery trips to ensure you always have some on hand. Only consider sets of items that are very cheap where you’re located (or at least, somewhere on earth). As an example, I might include milk, eggs, garlic, and onion. List the ingredients that you consider to be staples.
Includes the very basics
Easy mode
Just come up with something tasty that includes the required ingredients.
The problem is that not everybody would agree with what you consider to be basic. To me, you would absolutely have to include soy sauce, for example. And I mostly use white vinegar for cleaning. Replace that with rice wine vinegar, however…
The point of the basics list is that they’re isolated components covering different tastes. One salty (NaCl), one sweet (sucrose), one acidic (acetic acid).* If your proposed dish isn’t flexible with regards to the type of salt/sugar/acid, then I don’t think it fits the bill for this category.
~* I considered an umami too (msg), but I had a feeling that’s less accessible compared to the others. Maybe that’s just my Western bias though.~
Succession: Just call the first two Nightmare Mode and Hard Mode. That way you don’t have two Normal Modes.
Nightmare and hard imply a difficulty ordering. I used normal twice because I don’t think either are strictly easier or harder than the other. They’re just different.