Food is kind of a requirement for us humans. I mean we do need it to survive after all.
This doesn’t mean all of us are great at making it though. You might be used to having someone else cook for you or eating out more than you really should.
But with the events of the past year, you have probably had to cook a lot more than you might’ve before.
Finding a recipe and then going to the store to buy just the ingredients you need might be viable a few times but quickly you’ll realize you don’t want to have to run to the store every time you need something.
There are foods that you should always have in your kitchen that can act as the foundation for practically countless dishes. But what are these ingredients? Figuring them out yourself might not be as simple as having fun with Jackpot Capital no deposit bonus codes.
Sometimes these foods can just make a meal by themselves. In which case that’s just another reason to have them in your kitchen!
Another factor is how well they store. Foods that store well and can make a meal are good to have as food in your kitchen regardless of how useful they are in other dishes really when you think about it.
Rice
There’s a good reason rice is a staple food for the almost vast majority of the world. It’s cheap, it’s filling, it tastes good and it keeps when dry for practically forever.
What more could you really want from a portion of food. Cooking rice (depending on the type of course) doesn’t take more than a few minutes. And once you have rice you can put practically whatever you want on it and you’ll have a meal.
It’s not very hard. Think of any meal and rice can almost certainly be added to it without making it worse.
And before you think about saying cereal I just have one thing to say. Rice milk.
Have leftover chicken, meat, anything in between? Throw it in a pan with leftover or fresh rice with some vegetables and you have some form of stir fry.
There are even examples of rice being used as a dessert in many parts of the world. People eat types of rice with ice cream.
Long story short buying a twenty-pound bag of rice is going to last you a long time and you’ll always have something to eat. Also, it’s really cheap.
Beans
For most of the same reasons as rice beans are an extremely versatile and useful food to keep stored around in your cupboard.
And it’s cheap too.
Mixing beans and rice is practically a meal by itself.
Beans are practically a meal by themselves.
While not quite as versatile as rice (there are a lot more things I’d eat with rice than I would with beans personally) and depending on the bean it could take a bit more work to get them cooked but the idea is still the same.
A very filling food that is low cost, low maintenance and can be put with a lot of meals. Why not stock up on it?
Potatoes
Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew. Potatoes are incredibly useful ingredients. So many savory dishes can benefit from a little potato if you are trying to make them a bit more filling.
While not the healthiest of vegetables they do keep well and are certainly cheap.
Also, they taste good.
As I said earlier there are a lot of ways of cooking them. You can just boil them up, then you can mash them if you want or you could cook them in a stew. Other ideas are to bake them either as a baked potato or some form of oven-baked fries.
Speaking of fries while not the simplest dish to make (with deep-frying being deep frying and all) you could make your own french fries if you felt so inclined.
The possibilities are endless really.
Eggs
While this is moving away from the super cheap and stores forever of the other foods eggs are still incredibly useful and versatile.
They are absolutely chocked full of protein and lots of other great nutritional things while also being incredibly useful in not just cooking but baking too.
Along with that, they are also just a great meal by themselves.
You can scramble them, you can turn them into an omelet, cook them sunny side up, hard or soft boil them, the list goes on and on.
Just don’t eat them raw… that wouldn’t be a good idea.
Onions
While a little different from everything else on this list, since it isn’t really a meal by itself, onions are used in so many dishes there is no real reason not to have a few in your kitchen.
While you can technically get dried onion powder in the spice section that will add some of the flavors of onions nothing really matches having actual real onions in your dish in terms of flavor and texture.
They add so much to so many dishes they really should be in your kitchen at all times so you don’t have to think about it.
Really the same goes for garlic and other common herbs and spices like that but they can be harder to cook with and a little more expensive, so you should decide on your own whether or not you want to deal with it or not.
Honorary mentions
While these aren’t the most useful ingredients to have they certainly are versatile.
There are a lot of dishes that either need them or will benefit from them so why shouldn’t you have them in your kitchen?
- Olive oil – whenever you are cooking something in a pan you are probably going to use some form of oil. Now, most of the time you can use practically any type of oil but why do that when you can use (arguably) the best-tasting oil. The only real deciding factor for you should be the price. While it’s the best tasting it certainly isn’t the cheapest. Other vegetable oils you can buy in bulk for very cheap and then you can fill a five-dollar squeeze bottle with it and you have a very simple method of using oil for cheap.
- Spice – there is a reason wars were fought over these things. It’s simple, spices make food taste good. So why wouldn’t you want lots of spices in your dish? Finding what spices you need can be a little difficult, especially if you just walk into the spice aisle and start looking. If you need help a good idea is to figure out what type of dishes you like and want to start cooking regularly, then see which spices they commonly use. Buy those ones and you’ll start using them quickly.
- Tomatoes – so many dishes from so many cultures use a form of tomato sauce in them that having access to a good form of tomatoes can really improve your dishes. What you want usually is a form of crushed or diced tomatoes. These have the most “tomato” flavor while not usually having extra things like sugars added that most canned tomato sauces have while also not having that thick processed flavor and texture of tomato concentrate. If you can find a good way of getting crushed or diced tomatoes that’s from Italy you’re going to be golden. I say Italy because they have breeds of tomatoes so good you can eat them out of the can with a spoon and they’ll taste good. So you know they’ll be good in your dish.
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