Creating a meal from “nothing”

So you haven’t gone to the grocery store in awhile and there’s not a lot of fresh produce left or big ideas for fancier dishes. How do you create a meal out of seemingly nothing?

A big part of spontaneous meal creation is having a lot of basics on hand that go with a lot of things. Think of it as your dark jeans, plain black top, and black flats of the food world. Those items will pair with almost anything and you can easily jazz it up with a special star ingredient.

The main components of a “pantry” meal are:

1. Carb/base - This can be something like rice, noodles (Asian or Italian), or bread

2. Protein - For carnivores, obviously some chicken thighs or ground beef would work here. For us vegetarians, this would be typically a meat substitute of some sort like Impossible meat, fake chicken strips, tofu, or eggs

3. Sauce - This could be a red/tomato sauce, alfredo, stir fry sauce, or some sort of mayo

4. Extras - Here is where you can jazz it up with canned/jarred items like chickpeas, chilis in adobo, artichokes, or roasted red peppers. Or fridge foods like cheese, olives, pickled veggies, condiments, and random leftovers. Any produce that is still good or even frozen veggies would be a great addition.

I’ll go into more details in a future post about what staples I keep on hand, but for our “pantry” meal tonight, we are having:

• Red pasta

  • The rest of a box of farfalle pasta noodles

  • Homemade red sauce (based on Babish’s red sauce) that was made earlier in the week for pizza

  • Impossible ground meat

• Garlic cheese bread

  • Old-ish sourdough loaf from Whole Foods

  • Freshly shredded mozzarella cheese

  • Garlic, butter, oregano

• Side salad

  • Romaine lettuce

  • Freshly shredded mozzarella cheese

  • Olives

  • Garlic butter croutons

  • Dressing of person’s choosing (we have several dressing options in the fridge)

This is a simple Italian dinner with tons of flavor, but still easy to prepare with things we have on hand. I wish we had fresh tomatoes for the salad, but sadly (not actually), they were turned into fresh salsa earlier this week.