Store cupboard ingredients are the ingredients we use in everyday cooking, from salt and pepper to stock and oils, from rice and pasta to tinned tomatoes and relishes. Each week while shopping I am gradually adding to, or replenishing my store cupboard ingredients. Without them we would all be at a loss when it comes to making home-made meals.
I know what you may be thinking: 'But I'm on a budget each week, I can't afford to be buying other items that I haven't accounted for.' However, if you invest in good store cupboard ingredients they will save you money in the long term. Some morning you wake up to a hungry household – you don't have bread for toasting or cereal in the press, but you do have a bag of flour, an egg and some milk. Right there you have enough pancake batter to feed those hungry mouths. Or at dinner time, the cupboards are looking bare but you have some dried pasta, a tin of chopped tomatoes, some last few bits of veg and some dried herbs – well there is the basis for a lovely home-made Italian meal. What I am trying to say is that you should re-evaluate your shopping list and realise that home-made will work out cheaper and taste better than the convenient brands out there. I do use shop-bought sauces and convenient products too, but I certainly don't rely on them for every meal. Look: cooking can be as extravagant or as basic as you want, but either way you need the foundations.
All these store cupboard ingredients are the foundations of every good home-cooked meal, and if you keep your larder well stocked with the basics you will never go hungry. It will only be a matter of adding vegetables and/or meat to whizz up a good honest family meal.
In my larder:
Herbs and spices: see pp. 12–18
Oils: olive oil, rapeseed oil, toasted sesame oil
Vinegar: red wine, white wine, cider, balsamic, malt
Flour, etc.: plain, self-raising, wholemeal, type-00, baking powder
Mustard: Dijon, wholegrain, English
Sauces, etc.: soy sauce, oyster sauce, Worcestershire sauce, honey, maple syrup, Tabasco, pesto
Dried foods: wholemeal pasta sheets/short pasta/spaghetti, couscous, egg noodles, rice noodles, pulses and grains, porridge oats, stock cubes (beef, chicken and vegetable), dried yeast
Tinned/jarred food: chopped tomatoes, green beans, anchovy fillets, redcurrant jelly, horseradish sauce, peanut butter
Sea salt and black pepper