M. Suzanne Terry

Coffee – my most important basic staple

Congratulations! You made it! Whether it’s actually Day 7 for you or Day 72, you have gotten your kitchen and life ready for Epic Meal Planning. Take a little moment to celebrate.

For the next three days, we will be talking about staples for your pantry, fridge, and freezer. Today we’ll cover basics, and this weekend we’ll talk about the special staple lists that will give your plan the fluidity to keep it interesting.

Your basic staples list will be the guiding force of your meal planning. You can search all over for a basic list to get you started, but the truth is that, unless you are also willing to follow someone else’s meal plan and eating patterns to a T, your list will be different from theirs. I recommend making your own list because you are more likely to commit and follow a plan that works specifically for you than if you are constantly trying to make someone else’s love of walnuts your own.

The purpose of your basic staples are to give you a myriad of options for meals. They need to be foods that you can combine to make several different things, which will infuse your meal planning with endless variety, the lack of which is probably the greatest reason people give up on plans they’ve had in the past.

An easy way to start your list is to choose categories. My categories are pretty standard:

• Grains
• Beans
• Dairy/dairy substitutes
• Meat
• Vegetables (frozen)
• Produce (fresh)
• Canned goods
• Condiments
• Spice rack
• Beverages
• Baking

But that’s where the standard ends. To illustrate, I have listed some (not all – my spice and tea collections are massive – another reason to buy the book /shameless plug) of my basic staples for each category below:

• Grains – long grain rice, arborio (risotto) rice, brown rice, corn tortillas, oatmeal
• Beans – cannellini, black, pinto
• Dairy/dairy substitutes – almond milk, coconut milk (canned and refrigerated), goat cheese, butter
• Meat – ground beef, canned chicken
• Vegetables (frozen) – spinach, broccoli, peas, lima beans
• Produce (fresh) – onions, celery, carrots, seasonal fruit
• Canned goods – roasted red peppers, black olives, veggie broth, chicken broth, applesauce
• Condiments – brown mustard, yellow mustard, balsamic vinegar, apple cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, homemade pesto (frozen), olive oil, vegetable oil, coconut oil, grade B maple syrup
• Spice rack – curry, my custom Italian blend, cayenne pepper, vanilla beans
• Beverages – coffee, at least one black tea (current obsession – Irish Breakfast), peppermint tea, green tea, Emergen-C, red wine
• Baking – bread flour, AP flour, self-rising flour, eggs, yeast, baking chocolate, baking cocoa, baking powder, baking soda

Just looking at that truncated list makes me hungry for the hundreds of meals I could make from these items alone. And, because it is specific to my tastes and preferences, I would actually be excited about eating them. Alone, not many of them are very invigorating, but with their powers combined, the choices are gloriously endless. Because I have limited storage space, I have to limit variety of most items (although clearly rice is not one of those items – I love all the rices), but across categories, I’ve chosen items that mix and match nicely so that I don’t have to limit the variety of my meals.

The beauty of having a good plan for cooking for yourself is that you are never at the mercy of something you only sort-of like. You don’t have to keep mayonnaise if you don’t want to. So your task today is to think of the things you like to eat most often and use that to form a list of staples that you will be able to keep in your house in the space you have available. Start with some basic categories and see where that leads you.

I’m sharing my Epic Meal Planning strategies for Write 31 Days – click to see the master list.