Now, I'm no master chef or anything but I have my set of "staple" ingredients + the random new ones I try every few months. It's easy experimenting with new ingredients when you know what your staple ingredients do when you add them to a dish, and how they work in the order you add them to the pan in. Like, I've been addicted to Kimchi Fried Rice for 6 years now. However, I only started my cooking journey 3 years ago lol. I've cooked random stuff as a kid; hotdogs, fish, vegetables, but it was usually under the supervision of a parent and I didn't really understand what I was doing. If it looked brown, i just thought it was cooked. But I didn't know why people added tomatoes or onions or garlics. The first dish I learned 3 years ago was Kimchi Fried rice and I did my best finding out a way to replicate how my favorite restaurant used to cook it. It's one thing just following a recipe, it's another thing to understand why you saute XYZ first, then why you add other things last. Growing up, my dad would tell me salt goes last in fried rice and I didn't understand why. He didn't explain, he just said "that's how it works." Salt goes last because you dont want the salt to draw out moisture too early and ruin the texture of your food. It turns your rice into weird mush if you add it too early. Not even soupy mush, just dry-ass mush. Then your recipe tells you to add soy sauce and, now, your dry-ass mush is just bullshit. I had to trial and error this before and ended up eating random gleep glop gloop for dinner because I didn't wanna waste food. Ofc though, the order of when you put the salt depends on what dish you're making. I'm more so just talking about the science of fried rice. Fast forward to today, I thought about why I could make really good Kimchi Fried Rice, but NOT Kimchi Fried Rice WITH TUNA. fOR SOME REASON, when I add tuna to the dish, it ends up looking like shark bile. WTF??????? Turns out that even though my ingredients are correct, I had to go back to the drawing board to figure out the order in which I put the stuff in because the tuna was just sogging up everything. It didn't make sense. I thought removing the oil was enough or maybe people on the internet were just buying a brand of tuna i didn't have access to. No, I just had to fucking fry the tuna first. My dumbass was thinking, "because it's Kimchi Fried Rice WITH TUNA, that means I should add the tuna probably second/third to last bc it'sfried rice WITTHHHH TUNA." Then it clicked, it's Tuna Rice Fried Kimchi (and everything in between). anyway what a useless post. To be honest, I do buy new ingredients to play with every few months, but I still consume kimchi fried rice almost every other day. On average, I eat like 10kgs of kimchi monthly. I KNOW THAT'S A LOT OF SALT IDC But I experiment and go back to my kimchi fried rice. If I could get away with it, I would even just eat the kimchi alone but ik my body would eventually take a screenshot, and I may end up with a clapped digestive system