A confluence of events yesterday have influenced my thoughts today.
Yesterday I saw Adaptation and continued to read Writing at the Kitchen Table; the Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David.
In Adaptation Meryl Streep’s character, in her book, exhorts the reader to “whittle the world down”, to focus on what you love. If I’d written that exhortation, I’d have used the phrase (and have used the phrase) “pare the world down”, probably because I’m more of a cook than a woodworker.
And in the kitchen, I am striving to do just that, to pare it down. Yes, I want 40 things I know how to do well. 40 things to fall back on, to look forward to. Why 40? Is 40 too many? I suppose I picked 40 since it was a number with some historical, biblical weight to it, and because 40 ensures good variety. Perhaps I’ll find that it’s too many, and will scale the repertoire back to 30. We’ll see.
And once I get there? What does that mean? That I’ll never cook another new recipe again?
I doubt it. It just means that perhaps the question of "what to make for dinner" won't torment me so.
Elizabeth David, the English cookery writer, found her world pared down by circumstance. As an impoverished, ex-patriot in Greece during WWII, the ingredients available to her were limited to:
“the ancient, basic foods of the Mediterranean. The only stores she had to bother with were bread, olive oil, olives, salt fish, hard white cheese, dried figs, tomato paste, rice, dried beans, sugar, coffee and wine. She bought fish from the fisher boys: usually small fry or squid, with the occasional red mullet or langouste. [A neighbor] often gave her vegetables and fruits from her garden. Egss were cheap and plentiful, but meat was only available on feast days and consisted of pieces of roughly hewn kid, lamb or pork. Elizabeth described her diet as ‘limited, but at least [it] presented none of the meal-planning problems which. . .daily plague the better-off English housewife.
This influenced her cooking for the rest of her life. When she returned to England, after the war, ingredients were scarce and she cooked with whatever was available, with whatever fell into her hands.
I can’t do anything but sigh about the thousands of mediocre choices in the grocery store here, except out and out reject 99% of anything that’s processed and packaged. That helps whittle it down significantly. Then I am more or less left with the four food groups & spices--and the variety therein.
9:29:06 AM 
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