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