Five Dinners You Can Make From a Stocked Cupboard
Keep ten ingredients on hand and you'll rarely need a takeaway.
By Marta Alvarez · 7 min read
The ten-item cupboard
Tinned tomatoes, tinned beans or chickpeas, pasta, rice, stock cubes, onions, garlic, olive oil, eggs, and a hard cheese. Add frozen peas and frozen spinach and you have a week of dinners without shopping.
Everything below comes from that list plus whatever is wilting in the fridge.
The five dinners
Garlic and tomato pasta finished with cheese. Chickpeas simmered in tomato with cumin, eaten with rice. A frittata using any leftover vegetable. Bean and spinach soup blitzed smooth with stock and olive oil. Egg fried rice with peas.
None take more than twenty-five minutes, and each one improves with whatever fresh thing you happen to have.
Make them taste finished
Almost every cupboard dinner is transformed by one of four things: acid, fat, salt, or heat. A squeeze of lemon, a spoon of yoghurt, good salt at the end, or chilli flakes.
Learn that habit and improvised cooking stops tasting improvised.