Always use the best ingredients

Reading the biography of Alice Waters reminded me that the best food starts with the best ingredients, which often means expensive. Not always, but with cheese it's usually the case. For example, pesto made with grocery-store pre-grated parmesan will never be as good (in my opinion) as pesto made with high-quality, imported-from-Italy, bought-from-a-cheesemonger Parmesan Reggiano, even if the former is dirt-cheap and the latter costs a bomb.
Having won a bit of money at a bike race yesterday, I decided to treat myself to some nice cheese to put in the pesto I was planning to make with the $0.99 fresh basil from Koreatown and pinenuts left over from our Montreal Thanksgiving meal. Even though the tiny 50-gram block I got cost more than all of the other ingredients combined, and I had to use it all up, it was worth it: the resulting pesto is fantastic.