Pantry staples

A bit inspired by a recent post on Correres mi destino about always stocked food in the pantry, I thought I'd write a bit about the French-American supplies in my kitchen.

1. Cake/cookie ingredients
I always have on hand enough flour, butter, sugar, and eggs (plus baking powder/soda, chocolate chips, etc) to make a cake, cookies, or pie dough. I bought a large clear plastic storage container for my regular flour to facilitate measuring, and it holds about 2 kilos. I usually have 2-4 kilos of flour as backup, as well as whole wheat flour. I try to make sure I always have some bread yeast and various dry fruit (walnuts, pecans, raisins) as well as some canned fruit to keep my last minute baking options open. And yes, last minute baking is a thing for me.

2. Plain and fruit yogurt
My husband likes his plain yogurt (which I occasionally borrow for baking projects) and I like some simple fruit yogurt made by a local small brand.

3. Emmental, parmesan, ricotta, marscapone, and mozarella
While I love me some morbier or brillat savarin, hubby is not a huge cheese fan and most of our cheese stocks are cooked into pasta dishes, quiches, or a homemade pizza. Several Jamie Oliver recipes I like use mascapone, and I discovered that all of these cheeses are okay past the recommended sell by date, so they can hang out for 3-6 weeks in the fridge until I need them.

4. Olive oil and garlic
We finally started buying it in large gallon style bottles with handles because it doesn't go bad (quickly) and we use it regularly. I keep my garlic in the fridge now to keep it from going bad/sprouting too quickly

5. Pesto ingredients (in the summer)
I usually have a large basil plant in the summer, so keep pinons on hand (plus olive oil and parmesan cheese) to make some pesto sauce at a moment's notice.

6. Lardons
Because bacon bits are always handy for salads, quiches, or to replace regular bacon if I make some corn chowder.

7. Frozen chopped onions
We'll buy a bunch of onions at once, dice them, and freeze them. This avoids the oozy onion forgotten at the back of the pantry, and also reduces prep time when you want to use them, although I'll admit frozen onions are not great if you need raw onions (they are not crisp when they defrost).

8. Canned foods
I try to always have on hand canned diced tomatoes, tomato purée, tomato paste, canned fish (usually maquereau), canned beans (chickpea, red and white bean, lentilles) to make either Jamie Oliver's Saturday pasta (tomatoes, canned fish, onions, and some spices), some chilli, or humus.

9. Frozen meat
We always have some frozen hamburger patties, salmon, chicken, and occasionally pork or duck to make meal preparation easier when it's 7:30pm and we're not going to run to the store.

10. Grains
In additional to some basic pasta (spaghetti, lasagne, torti) that I try to buy whole grain, I always have a stock of white rice, basmati rice, round risotto rice, whole grain rice and couscous. The rices are all labeled because deary hubby can't tell the difference by looking at them (and I might have gotten upset he used risotto rice as though it was regular white rice).

11. Frozen pizzas
Because when you don't feel like cooking, a frozen pizza is a life saver.

12. Pain grillé
We don't often eat meals that really "need" bread (frozen pizzza anyone?), so we don't buy a baguette everyday. But since hubby likes having something close to bread without having to go and buy it every day, we always have a stock of pain grillé that he uses as a bread replacement. We also try to keep a stock of the pre-baked baguettes that you put in the oven for 20 minutes since you can store them for several weeks and they're perfect for us when we want a baguette but haven't gone to the boulangerie.

So what don't we have?

I mentioned in #12 that we rarely have a fresh baguette, and in #3 that a traditional cheese platter are not the norm in our house. We also don't have what French grocery stores call "desserts": chocolate or vanilla pudding (Danette), pretty much anything La Laitière, crèmes, etc. We don't have chicory or Nespresso coffee capsules (though I have a machine hidden away). We don't have any nutella. While both the hubby and I have a weakness for the Kettle chips with sea salt and black pepper, we don't usually stock chips or pretzels or a lot of apero food. My philosophy is that if I want to eat something I need to feel hungry enough that I'm willing to cook something (not just open a bag or can), so we very rarely have ready to eat food, like pre-made salads (carrots rapés or taboulé are never in our fridge), cooked meat to re-heat (think those cooked chicken pieces you can buy in a bag), or pre-washed/bagged/cut fruits or veggies. Hubby does like Frosted Flakes for breakfast, but I usually make something for the week (pancakes, waffles, muffins, bagels, etc). For a while we regularly had a pâte brisé in the fridge to make a quiche or tarte salé, but we didn't always use them before they went sour (one sniff is enough to tell!), so we stopped trying to always have one on hand.

If I think of some of the differences with my mom's kitchen, we never have store bought salad dressing (we mix our own) and I've left behind cake/brownie mix baking since the mixes are expensive in import stores. Growing up we always had a huge bag of potatoes at the bottom of the pantry, but we'd never get through that many potatoes before they were all sprouting.

So those are my French-American pantry staples.