The Well-Stocked Kitchen: Staples

I don't claim to be an Expert, but I am happy with what I've chosen to keep in my kitchen at all times. This is my basis for distinguishing between MRMs and Needs Planning. Ingredients listed by storage area : Freezer, Refrigerator, Pantry, and Cooking Cupboard (the latter having things like seasonings and baking soda which might get in the way of larger or more regularly used items in the pantry).

Freezer - The Friend of the Impulse Chef

Hands-down, the biggest obstacle to my cooking in college was my inability to have a freezer. (No, wait, it was the lack of a range or proper oven. No, wait, it was the shortage of refrigerator space. No, wait, it was the walking-a-mile-and-a-half-to-the-grocery-store which made it impossible to transport frozen goods. Bah. Anyway.) If you can afford a large supplementary freezer for storing leftovers, so much the better.

• Boneless chicken breasts, bagged individually upon getting home from the store. Yes, I could buy by the large bag, and may do so if the individual breasts keep getting larger - but there's usually more water in the bagged variety. Whole chickens are much harder to store raw and much harder to use cooked. And I'm lazy about deboning, and don't fry much.
• Ground beef, bagged in 1-lb chunks
• 16-oz bags of frozen vegetables I prefer spinach and broccoli, though green beans aren't bad.
• 16-oz bag of vegetable mix The pea, corn, lima bean, carrot, and green bean mix is part of my mother's chicken pot pie recipe. It must always be available.
• Frozen berries, nice for scones and summery things
• Chopped yellow or white onion, in a plastic container, in a plastic bag We started out just using a Tupperware knockoff to contain our extra chopped onion after a recipe. Mistake. The entire freezer smelled of it. The bag is necessary, but the leftover onion? Great. Single portions frequently need fractions of an onion.
• Chopped celery, plastic bag Buy a bunch of celery, chop and freeze immediately. It's not like it's good for anything but an ingredient for another dish, anyway.
• Chopped soup veggies, in a large plastic container I think this will merit a post in itself, but I like to grab a few fresh carrots, a couple parsnips, and some green onion at the store so I can chop it into many portions' worth of soup veggies. Parsnips in soup. Mmm.
• Popcorn
• Hot Dogs
• English Muffins good for Saturday breakfast or mini pizzas; Dad makes egg sandwiches with them, roomie uses them for hamburger buns
• Shredded cheddar
• Shredded mozzarella
• Shredded parmesan Shredded cheeses tend to freeze well; buy a bunch on sale, and the cooking requires less effort.
• Toaster Strudel, because. Same for frozen turnovers. Hmm, this isn't something that's ever likely to crop up again on a cooking blog... eh, might as well admit it now.

Refrigerator - Use By Expiration Date

This is a very dangerous zone for me, wherein fresh strawberries usually molder before eating, where forgotten cheeses turn all sorts of interesting shades, where leftovers crouch in the corner waiting to mutate into a being lively enough to take over the refrigerator and then the world! - ahem.

• Eggs - Cheap protein, easy to cook, used in a lot of things
• Milk - I'm an addict anyway, so I'll go through a gallon a week. More moderate persons may need to figure how much is safe to purchase before risking going bad.
• Applesauce - not terribly perishable, great quick food for lazy nights
• Tub of yogurt - ditto
• Block of cheddar - Yay, cheese slicer! Get that quick food!
• Sliced ham - Great ingredient for sandwiches, eggs, pizza, pasta...
• Ragu spaghetti sauce - Ah, childhood. Also pizza sauce. I should probably see if my stockpiled homemade sauce works as well for the latter.
• Stick butter (regular, not unsalted) makes almost anything taste better. As a child, we had stick butter, and stick margarine, and tub margarine - the first two to be used equally in cooking, the last for the table. Then we found out that butter is about as good for you, and we don't have to remember which to use. Store one stick in the pantry, and it'll stay soft enough for the table.
• Whipping cream, with screw-cap container - It's a bit exotic, but I really love making scones (for which this is an ingredient), as well as my Special Pasta, and this tends to stay good in the capped boxes for at least a month or two past the expiration date - a nice, long time.
• Mustard
• Ketchup
• Garlic, pre-chopped, in a jar Much better than dried garlic, not as much work (or prone to sprouting) as fresh. A little lasts a long time for a rarely-cooking single, even one who frequently adds two, three, or four times the recipe amount (mm, garlic)
• Soy sauce
• Worcestershire sauce
• Jam
• Chopped walnuts
• Dry active yeast for bread and pizza dough

Pantry: Daily Bread

Here tastes will vary widely. I'm not going to include my favorite brand of cold cereal, or canned fruit, or my beloved tea collection, or my homemade spaghetti sauce - but I will include the things I like to have on hand to make other things, or to be the centerpiece of a cooked meal. All limited-time-people should have uncooked quick meal options, in my opinion, but that's for each to decide alone.

• Rolled oats, good for oatmeal and scones and cookies
• Raisins, Craisins, other dried fruit ditto
• 12-oz package semi-sweet chocolate chips Because you never know.
• Backup chopped walnuts
• Backup Ragu
• Backup applesauce
• Spaghetti noodles
• Tri-color bowtie or rotini pasta (for special pasta)
• Egg noodles (for soup and stroganoff)
• Condensed cream of mushroom soup
• Can diced tomatoes, Italian-seasoned aka with basil and/or garlic and/or oregano
• Bread besides sandwiches, easy hot dog bun, meatloaf ingredient, toast...
• Kraft mac'n'cheese for those non-cooking nights - it was EasyMac before I had a roommate to keep me from wasting the extra, which tastes too terrible to eat leftover
• Wild rice Not overly fond of regular, or that would be a staple too
• Potatoes I prefer russet, roomie prefers yellow, but some versatile variety is needed
• Onions My home prefers the cheaper, stronger yellow onions, but white work pretty well too
• Dry stuffing mix

Cooking Cupboard: Now We're Cooking

This is a pretty arbitrary division with Pantry - as witnessed by the number of items on this list which my mother keeps in the pantry - but I'm making my arbitrary line at "things we can't fit in our tiny, tiny pantry, and so put in the extra cupboard". And I really have trouble imagining a well-stocked small kitchen where everything fits in the fridge and pantry. Plus, most of these are pretty impossible to imagine as the centerpiece of a dish, unlike most of the things in the pantry.

• Unbleached all-purpose flour
• Bread flour This is utterly unnecessary unless you want to be particular about breadmaking. And utterly necessary if, like my roomie or my dad, you bake bread regularly. Mmm.
• White/granulated sugar
• Light brown sugar Cookies and oatmeal
• Honey yay, anti-allergy properties!
• Vegetable and/or canola oil Brownies! Also, backup multipurpose, though it'd probably be enough to have just...
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• Cooking spray Ah, luxury. Any oil can do, but why take the time to grease by hand?
• Vegetable shortening Essential for homemade pie crust, unnecessary otherwise
• White vinegar
• Red wine vinegar Fun fact: aside from sauteing and my favorite chicken marinade, can also be used to make homemade fruit fly traps, same as apple cider vinegar. Which is why we tend to use this by the bottle in summer. (The traps tend to be extremely effective at clearing the apartment within 24 hours and extremely not at keeping flies away more than a couple weeks.)
• Baking soda
• Baking powder Scones again; also other older recipes 
• Unsweetened cocoa
• Chicken bouillon granules
• Beef bouillon granules
• Table salt
• Black pepper in its own pepper grinder
• Garlic salt
• Lawry's Seasoning Salt
• Italian Seasoning** (packaged herb mix of marjoram, thyme, rosemary, savory, sage, oregano, basil)
• Garlic powder
• Dried dill weed
• Dried thyme
• Cinnamon
• Vanilla extract 

**If you don't stock Italian Seasoning, you'll pretty much need to have dried basil and oregano at the very least for most of the dishes I like to make. Or an herb mix you particularly like. Beware of the ones containing salt - I make my food plenty salty enough, so more would be Bad.

Those are the ones I consider basic staples that I wouldn't want to cook without. A few more exotic ingredients I personally use a lot, for specific dishes:

• Ground cloves
• Ground mustard
• Ground thyme
• Rubbed sage
• McCormick brown gravy mix
• Red wine

Intro and Terminology

The First-World Woes and Angst of Singledom After Family Cooking

It can be very difficult, keeping myself well-fed. I grew up with a wonderfully versatile mother who, being a stay-at-home mom with a talent for it, conscientiously cooked supper for us most nights - and it might be my memory betraying me, but there seem to have been far more made-from-scratch meals than hotdog and Kraft mac'n'cheese nights. Family dinners were important, and so was nutrition, and so was money.

Unfortunately, duplicating my childhood menu today is difficult. The whole chicken Mom would roast has enough meat for 8-10 servings of anything we would have made - and I am not going to eat 8-10 servings of anything in the time it takes chicken to go bad in the refrigerator, even if it is one of the rare situations where chicken won't go unbearably tough on reheating. The mashed potatoes as a side dish? Ha! Mashed potato leftovers are, as is, good only in the sense that they will prevent you from starving without actively making you sick. Then there's the fact that I will very easily become bored with the same meal in the same week, so unless I have plenty of freezer space and a freezable menu, it's best if I limit myself to cooking 1-2 portion meals. Or cook something my roommate really likes, then use that as leverage to get her to cook; that works too.

I will admit that, picky eating and all, I could probably subsist happily on a diet of breakfast and pizza, and I could still eat spaghetti with pre-made Ragu sauce several nights a week. I couldn't, however, stop feeling guilty about it. Frozen dinners looked like a good option for a while, until I realized that most of the single-sized ones have very little in the way of nutrition or balance. This goes double for most of the "diet" meals, which usually cut calories and fat but leave very little in the way of actual nutrition. (I do have a weakness for Healthy Choice frozen meals for lunch, but they tend to have way too few calories for a healthy adult's full meal, and cost way too much to supplement.)

So! Small portions and from scratch; this limits the range of options, especially since I want the familiar taste of Mom's cooking. Well, that and Real Cooking. As a child, I was convinced that Real Cooks did not use recipes or measurements. As an adult, I know better, but I still prefer recipes that I have learned so well that I no longer need measures and can manipulate freely.

And did I add time as a factor?

My job currently tends to take up at least 70 hours of my week, if not more. Having time for hobbies, family, friends, and sleep (roughly in that order) is all kind of important for me. I really love making fresh scones and an omelet on the rare lazy Saturday morning, but it would be ridiculous to plan on the requisite hour and a half for cooking/cleaning that on the average weeknight. (Especially since I usually end up taking three hours - ADHD is antithetical to keeping me in the kitchen for extended bouts.) For similar reasons, my menus usually need to be fairly easy. So, time, ease, variety, relatively low cost, familiarity, nutrition - it's rare indeed to find a meal that fits all of the above.

I don't always try for any of the above. But for the times when I do, and succeed on several points, I feel extremely proud of myself. And tonight I'm planning on experimenting with a new menu issue, and it occurs to me that there may be others out there looking for a fairly simple single diet, so it might be worthwhile to start a blog documenting this stuff. Even if I am too sporadic to be worth following (sorry).

Terminology

The Mouse (c'est moi!) has a mind of quirks and tangents, but fiercely devoted to easy reference. Ergo, a list of terms I intend to use as tags:

Half-hour meal: An entire meal (protein, carb, veggie) ready within about half an hour, if ingredients are ready-to-hand

Leftover-worthy: Meals which are good enough to be worth having leftovers, of course. Most of them leave the cook with little choice.

MRM: Meals Ready to Make. These are meals that I can make with what I usually have on hand in the kitchen. I will try to refrain from using this for meals which require, say, ground thyme, which I keep on hand but would not expect in most kitchens.

Needs Planning: No matter how much I love the simplicity of my sauteed mushrooms, the fact remains that fresh mushrooms will remain so only for a couple days. Which means they will not be in my refrigerator unless I plan on it, and they will go to waste if I do not use them as planned. Still, worth it when the grocery store is on the way home and the mushrooms right in the front and cheap.

Possible MRM/Possible Needs Planning: Sure, my dumpling recipe is MRM with my kitchen, but not everyone keeps ground thyme on hand, so it's only possibly an MRM. Similarly, my mushrooms might require planning, but the recipe works almost as well with canned mushrooms, which are easy to keep on hand. It's Schrödinger's meal: until you look, it's possible you can make it without advance planning!

Shower meal: Remember aforementioned time shortage? It pairs poorly with my love of 40-minute shower time. However, quite a few meals require 15-20 minutes' work in the kitchen and then cook by themselves quite nicely unattended for that time. As long as you remain callously deaf to the weeping of firefighters everywhere at the thought of unattended heating devices. A shower meal might require some time to finish, but leaves you free to accomplish other tasks for the bulk of that time.

Stockpiling: A LOT of my favorite tricks have more to do with a well-stocked kitchen than particularly clever recipes. A meal with a lot of fresh vegetables or dairy products needs to be planned, or the time spent going to the grocery store will likely erase all the time saved by a quick meal. Hopefully at least one of these posts will involve me explaining how I half-reinvented mirepoix by accident. Finding staples that store well and add to a variety of recipes is kind of a must.

Weekend: Weekend meals are those which take more time and effort than my criteria would prefer. Actually, a lot more. And possibly planning. But it is so glorious to feel like a Real Cook and have a Real Meal once in a while that I do not intend to stiff this blog by excluding banquets for one (or two - I share my living space, and it's dull to banquet alone when a friend is there.) Besides, there's always....

Weekend Leftover-worthy, Weekend Stockpiling: No, these aren't individual tags; they're here to remind us that some Weekend projects pay dividends. Chicken pot pie from scratch - including the crust - is a lovely little weekend banquet, but an entire pie is also Leftover-worthy and will provide a good 4-6 portions for Hungry People. (I skip enough meals for time that I usually qualify as Hungry.) And if I'm still blogging at the end of the summer, I will hopefully be able to record the glorious annual tradition that is the Making of the Spaghetti Sauce, in which my roommate and I buy as much as we can carry from the farmer's market and spend the better part of a weekend making and canning tomato sauce for the year ahead.

There we go! And now, to see where the blog shall go!