It’s coming up on five years since the pandemic lockdown instigated our collective spate of panic-buying groceries. And I’m pleased to report that I’ve finally gotten through my bulk order of canned sardines.
I ate those sardines on buttered toast (divine, with a squeeze of lemon, some sliced red onions, loads of black pepper), stirred them into chickpea salads and mashed them with sautéed garlic for quick pasta sauces. And if I wasn’t feeling sardine-ish, I also had a minor sea’s worth of tuna, salmon and anchovies rubbing fins with the canned beans and tomatoes, bags of rice, boxes of pasta and jars of tahini, preserves, pickles and chiles packed tight on every shelf. My pantry is comfortingly and reassuringly filled to the gills (and not just with gills).
I know I’m not alone. Because if there’s one thing the pandemic underscored, it’s that having a well-stocked pantry goes beyond the convenience of fast, easy meals. All those pastas and beans bring peace of mind. No matter the havoc raging in the outside world — be it pandemics and hurricanes or just too much work to think about grocery shopping — there’s a grounding calm in knowing you always have something on hand to make into dinner tonight. Also inherent in pantry cooking is thrift. Cooking at home is already a money-saver compared with eating out or ordering in, especially when it’s based on an economical roster of beans, rice and pasta.
All that said, pantry cooking is more than merely getting a meal on the table. Now that you’ve assembled all those ingredients, what are the best, most flavorful and appealing ways of using them both quickly and easily? After all, if you already don’t have the time or energy to shop, you might not have much in the reserves for cooking, either.
As I’ve worked down my bulk orders, I’ve learned that finding ways to turn everyday staples into meals that sparkle isn’t hard, as long as you have the right ingredients on hand. Here are some of my best strategies, tips and shopping suggestions to making pantry meals with style.
Color With Condiments
Think of your pantry staples as blank canvases, waiting for the Abstract Expressionism of your condiments. Stock up on bright, bold items that you know you love, and throw in a couple of new ones to play with. My palette includes chile crisp and chile paste, Dijon and whole-grain mustard, olive tapenade, red curry paste, several hot sauces, Indian pickles (lime, mango and mixed), red and green salsas, and I use them with an open hand. Adding a few spoonfuls of your favorite condiment to classic pantry recipes can transform them from workaday to wonderful.
Try These Easy Glow-Ups
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Add a few tablespoons of tapenade or curry paste to your favorite midnight pasta, and a dollop of chile crisp to cheesy baked beans or fettuccine Alfredo.
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Instead of making a homemade herb oil for Colu Henry’s wildly popular creamy white beans, stir in a few tablespoons of store-bought pesto instead.
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Put those pantry sauces to work on pastas: Try Eric Kim’s delightfully easy gochujang buttered noodles, in which the fiery Korean chile paste is tempered with butter and a dab of honey. Miso gives Alexa Weibel’s five-star, five-ingredient creamy pasta its inimitable umami richness. And Nargisse Benkabbou’s harissa puttanesca with toasted almonds is a delightful combination of crunchy textures and salty, fiery flavors.
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Make dips for dinner by stirring salsa or Indian pickle into yogurt or prepared hummus and serving it with cut up vegetables, crackers, and whatever cheese and salami are in your fridge.
Learn to Love the Pantry Sauce
You can whip up so many sauces from pantry ingredients: peanut sauce, Caesar dressing, yogurt sauce, tartar sauce, creamy coconut dressing, tonnato sauce. Use them to zip up lackluster meals like a rotisserie chicken or bowl of plain rice, and give new life to plain proteins like meat or shrimp dug out of the freezer, or tofu or eggs pulled from the fridge. Even a drizzle of good olive oil, a sprinkle of flaky sea salt plus one spice (coriander, red pepper flakes, cumin, cinnamon), and a squeeze of lemon or drizzle of honey can lift almost any dish beyond the boring, whether a workaday lentil soup or gentle, comforting vanilla ice cream.
Your Refrigerator Is an Extension of Your Pantry …
Long-keeping vegetables and citrus may already be part of your pantry checklist, and garlic and onions, potatoes and sweet potatoes, carrots and celery, ginger and citrus (some grated zest makes beans, soups and pasta sing) should all be a given.
Some fridge-dwellers you may not have considered: radishes (take the greens off, store in a closed container, and they last for weeks), fennel bulbs, leeks and scallions (stored root side down in water), all of which add brightness and freshness to pantry meals.
Cured meats like salami and hard sausages, aged hard cheeses like Parmesan and pecorino, and brined cheese like feta can keep for weeks and sometimes even months when properly stored. Ditto tofu and yogurt, which often lasts beyond its sell-by date (inspect it carefully and give it a smell before using).
… And So Is Your Freezer
You probably have frozen corn and peas on hand, but frozen spinach can be a godsend when there’s nothing fresh and green in the house. I especially love it in a very verdant pasta with feta and yogurt.
It’s easy to buy individually wrapped frozen fish fillets and bags of wild shrimp, and they’ll thaw in a flash. Frozen seafood can also be cheaper than the fresh stuff at your fishmonger, and the quality is often better — especially when it comes to salmon. As for meat, ground beef, chicken and turkey will thaw more quickly than steaks and chops, and sausages even more quickly than ground meat. Pairing ground turkey with rice, peas or corn and spices in a keema-inspired one-pot meal has become one of my family’s favorite pantry dishes in the weeknight rotation.
And as Hetty Lui McKinnon taught me well, always keep frozen dumplings on hand to make her dumpling noodle soup, with, say, carrots, peas and sliced radishes instead of broccoli and bok choy, depending on what you have that week.
Pantry cooking means being flexible and giving yourself permission to be creative and to adapt the recipe to what’s on hand. At the heart of it all is a well-stocked pantry — and knowing how to use it.
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