{^ The basic pantry^ }

The pantry is the backbone of your kitchen. Many

beginning cooks are intimidated by recipes because of the
sheer number of ingredients that need to be purchased the
first time they cook something. But pancakes are a
convenient food precisely because they are made from
ingredients you pretty much always have on hand. Imagine
having to buy flour, butter, eggs, buttermilk, baking
powder, sugar, oil, and vanilla extract every single time you
wanted to make pancakes!
I like to keep a well-stocked kitchen, and, as such, my
pantry is a large one. I recently completely emptied my
kitchen shelves and refrigerator and reorganized them, in
the process cataloguing every pantry item I had into a single
document that lives online, where I can access it at any time
to see exactly what I have to work with. (What? Doesn’t
everybody do that?) I came up with 357 different food
items, including 8 types of salt and 63 different spices
(yikes!).
There’s no need for you to keep a pantry that large, but
every kitchen should be stocked with some basics. Here
you’ll find some tips on how to best use your refrigerator, as
well as a list of ingredients that’ll help you get through most
of the recipes in this book with only the need to purchase
perishable ingredients fresh. I divided it into refrigerated