Welcome back everyone to our final episode this week with Natasha Ho. She is a master

trained chef, avid traveler, and also the founder of the well-traveled palette. So there's

a lot more to learn about that, all that's in the podcast description, but we have been

talking about cooking this week, cooking from the garden. Yesterday we talked about mistakes.

Today we're going to talk about pairing ingredients together, which I'm really, really curious about

because there's just so many different ways that you could do it that I guess it becomes a little

overwhelming to me, Natasha. So I'm curious if you have just some general rules of thumb to kick us

off with. Yes, and I mentioned this a little bit yesterday when we were talking about how to

figure out pairing together the items. And so one thing I often repeat and tell people to think

about is if it grows together, it goes together. And that simply means if the ingredients that you're

working with come from the same part of the world, they're going to pair really nicely together. Those

flavors are going to go together very, very well. You can also think about this in terms of seasonality.

If ingredients grow around the same time of year, they're also going to pair very nicely together.

So if we're thinking about in the winter time, and we have access to things like apples or

cranberries, if we're thinking about root vegetables, all of those things will work really nicely

together. The flavors will play off of themselves, play off of each other very well. So you can use

this as a guide when you're trying to figure out how do I combine the things together. Think about

if it grows together, it will go together. Okay, yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, as a gardener,

we're thinking command and planting, we're thinking, you know, grouping things together,

inter-planting and cropping, and it all makes sense. I mean, if I can plant it in the same bed,

generally speaking, there's a way to prepare it that tastes good. Exactly. Yeah, and it can be a

really simple thing. I've talked to small yeas as well and asked them, like, how do you decide

...