Assume you must feed yourself for a week by cooking from a set of TWELVE basic of ingredients. Which ingredients would you pick (or which of mine would you replace) and why?
Apples | Buy a three- or four-pound bag of apples at the supermarket. Because they are bagged they won’t have those annoying adhesive labels stuck on to each apple. Buy a different brand next time, until you find a brand that you enjoy eating raw when you head off first thing in the morning for your newspaper. |
Carrots | Buy a two- or three-pound bag of carrots. Choose a bag with more small carrots, rather than a bag with only half a dozen monsters. You can munch a raw carrot those days when you don’t feel like munching an apple when you head off first thing in the morning for your newspaper. |
Cheese | Buy a 450 gram slab of common cheddar or mozzarella cheese from the supermarket. You can get fancier (a.k.a. “more expensive”) stuff next time. |
Chicken | Buy a pack of five or six boneless chicken breasts. The chicken breasts are huge, much too big for me. I cut mine into thirds and wrap them in waxed paper yielding fifteen or eighteen servings. Into the freezer with them. |
Eggs | Buy a carton of a dozen (or nowadays eighteen) regular eggs. |
Flour | Buy a two kilogram sack of general purpose white flour |
Milk | I hate lugging water home when I can get it by turning on a tap, so I buy a large sack of powdered milk. Things have changed since last your mother struggled with powdered milk in the mid-fifties. If you enjoy lugging water home, buy a 3-pack of milk – you get three transparent plastic bags of milk in a bigger bag; you can re-use those smaller strong plastic bags for years for storing soups and leftovers, packing sandwiches and so on. |
Oil | Buy a one- or two-litre bottle of cooking oil. Vegetable oil seems OK, at least while you get started. |
Onions | Buy a three- or four-pound bag of yellow onions. |
Potatoes | Buy three or four of those dark-brown skin baking potatoes. You don’t have to eat an entire potato at one sitting! |
Rice | Get a small bag (five hundred grams?) of long-grained rice. White. Brown. Doesn’t matter today. Just buy some plain rice. Fancy rice you can buy next week. |
Tea | Buy a small carton of tea bags, good quality. You deserve a cup of tea and a sit-down after you have cooked a meal. If you are a glutton for sleepless nights, buy coffee instead of tea. But buy one or the other so that you can reward yourself for making it through the night to the start of another day, and for making it through another day to the restful time of evening. |