A weeknight pantry is a short list of tins, jars, dry goods and freezer staples that can each make a dinner with one fresh ingredient added. The whole list fits in a single cupboard: tinned tomatoes, chickpeas, beans, tuna, coconut milk, passata, a curry paste, pasta, rice, red lentils, couscous, stock cubes, oil, and in the freezer peas, spinach, sliced bread and grated cheese. With that in place, “there’s nothing in” stops being true, which in a small flat is most of the battle.

The rule: everything on the list must make a meal with one fresh ingredient

The test for whether something belongs in the cupboard is simple. Can it make a dinner with one thing from the fridge, or with nothing at all? Tinned tomatoes plus an onion is a pasta sauce. Chickpeas plus a curry paste and coconut milk is a curry. Tuna plus pasta and frozen peas is a dinner with nothing fresh in it whatsoever.

If an item needs three other fresh things before it’s useful, it’s a recipe ingredient, not a staple, and it doesn’t get cupboard space. This kills off the jar of something unusual bought for one dish and never opened again. In a rented flat with one cupboard for all of this, there is no room for a tin that only works in a recipe you’ll make once a year. In a shared house, where your cupboard is one shelf, the rule is even harder to argue with.

The list below is what passes that test. It’s deliberately dull. Dull is what gets used.

Tins and jars

  • Chopped tomatoes, four tins. The base of most weeknight cooking.
  • Passata, one carton or jar. Smoother than tomatoes for a quick pasta sauce.
  • Chickpeas, three tins. Curry, salad, mashed on toast.
  • A second bean, kidney or cannellini, two tins. Chilli, soup, bean salad.
  • Tuna, two tins. Pasta, jacket potato, a cold lunch.
  • Coconut milk, two tins.
  • A curry paste in a jar. One jar, one type, kept in the fridge once opened as the label says.
  • Stock cubes, a pack.
  • Olive oil or rapeseed oil, and a small bottle of vinegar.
  • Soy sauce and a jar of peanut butter, which between them make a sauce for noodles or rice with frozen veg.

That’s the whole tin-and-jar shelf. Quantities are what a shelf holds without doubling up, not a stockpile. When a tin count drops to one, it goes on the list.

Dry goods and how much to keep

This is where the quantities stop being vague, because the British Nutrition Foundation gives single-portion weights for dried starches, and those turn a bag into a known number of dinners. Their portion guide puts dried pasta at 75g and dried rice at 65g per adult, dried lentils at 50g (about two handfuls) and dried couscous at 90g (about two handfuls). The same guide suggests 3-4 portions of starchy foods a day across all meals, so dinner is one of those, not all of them.

Applied to supermarket pack sizes:

  • A 500g bag of pasta is roughly six or seven single portions, or three dinners for two.
  • A 1kg bag of rice is about fifteen single portions.
  • A 500g bag of red lentils is ten portions, and red lentils need no soaking, so they’re the useful one on a weeknight.
  • A 500g box of couscous is five or six portions and cooks in the time it takes the kettle to boil.

Keep one open bag of each and one spare, and let the spare be the restock trigger. Cooking for two with a partner, the bags simply run out twice as fast; the quantities per portion don’t change, so the mug lines below still hold. The NHS advice to choose wholegrain varieties where you can is easy to follow at the cupboard stage: buy the wholewheat pasta and brown rice once and that is what’s there at 7pm. You don’t have to decide to be healthy on the night.

Weigh 65g of rice and 75g of pasta a single time and mark a mug for each. After that the bags last exactly as long as the maths says they should, which is another way of saying the pan stops being overfilled. I found this more satisfying than I expected.

Four glass jars of green lentils, white beans, red lentils and chickpeas on a white shelf below small potted succulents Photo: Gülşah Tüfekçi via Pexels

Freezer staples that count as pantry

A fridge-freezer drawer is part of the cupboard for these purposes, because these things keep for months and need no planning:

  • Frozen peas. The fresh ingredient in a tuna pasta, a risotto, a curry.
  • Frozen spinach. Blocks that drop into a dal or a sauce.
  • Sliced bread. Half a loaf in the freezer at all times; it toasts from frozen. Beans on toast, cheese on toast and eggs on toast are all dinners. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
  • Grated cheese. A bag of it in the freezer means a pasta bake or a topping is always possible. It goes crumbly but melts fine.
  • A bag of mixed frozen vegetables or frozen sweetcorn for a stir-fry or a fried rice.

Bread in particular belongs in the freezer, for the reason in the next section.

Potatoes, onions and garlic: the cool dark corner

Three fresh things live alongside the tins because, stored properly, they keep far longer than anything in the salad drawer: potatoes, onions and garlic. The NHS says storing potatoes in a cool, dark and dry place or in the fridge will help stop them sprouting, and not to eat any green, damaged or sprouting bits. In a flat, the cool dark corner is usually the bottom of a cupboard on an outside wall. Potatoes go there in the paper bag they came in rather than a plastic one, onions beside them but not touching, and garlic on the shelf above.

WRAP reports that UK homes throw away 960 tonnes of bread a day (24 million slices) and 1,300 tonnes of potatoes a day (8.2 million potatoes), and that nearly 40% of household food waste is food not used in time. So it’s the cheapest, most basic staples that go in the bin, not the fancy things. That’s why bread goes in the freezer on the day it’s bought and potatoes go in the dark, not in the fruit bowl by the window.

A jacket potato with tuna, cheese or beans from the list above is the most reliable no-shop dinner on here, and it needs an oven and nothing else.

Five dinners the list makes on its own, and the restock trigger

Each of these uses one fresh item at most, and most work with none:

  1. Chickpea and spinach curry. Curry paste, a tin of chickpeas, coconut milk, frozen spinach, rice. No fresh ingredient needed. An onion improves it.
  2. Tuna, pea and lemon pasta. Pasta, tuna, frozen peas, oil. A lemon or a bit of cheese if there is one.
  3. Red lentil dal. Red lentils, a tin of tomatoes, stock, curry paste, frozen spinach. Serve with rice or the frozen bread toasted.
  4. Bean chilli on a jacket potato. Kidney beans, chopped tomatoes, an onion from the dark corner, a potato from the same place, grated cheese from the freezer.
  5. Couscous with roasted veg or, failing that, chickpeas, peas and a soy-and-peanut dressing. Couscous, stock, whatever is in the freezer.

The restock trigger is the spare. When the second bag of pasta or the last tin of tomatoes gets opened, it goes on the list, and the list is what gets added to the one weekly shop alongside the fresh items. Nothing gets bought “just in case” beyond that one spare, because the cupboard doesn’t have room for it and, as WRAP’s figures show, “just in case” is what ends up in the bin.

Fitting all of this into a single cupboard in a small kitchen is a matter of rearranging rather than buying containers, which is covered in organising a small kitchen without buying anything. The rest of the meal planning section covers what to do with the cupboard once it’s stocked.