An Ingredient Pantry is Your Best Strategy

Some time ago, I wrote about the specific foods I make from scratch that save me the most money. In a household economic downturn, it’s worthwhile to examine your grocery spending. For no other reason, you can get more creative with your food costs than with other fixed costs. If only utility companies put out weekly ads and offered coupons and loss leaders…

What I didn’t mention in that article, though, was the best overall strategy for saving money, better than shopping the sales and buying in bulk: Stock and cook from your pantry with basic ingredients. I’m talking about focusing on the most basic meal components you can buy, things like

• flour, sugar

• potatoes

• rice

• eggs

• canned meat

• oatmeal

• milk

• beans

• cheese

• seasonal produce and long-storage produce like carrots, onions, and cabbage

Because this is the internet, I’ll say right now that we all have our own definitions of “ingredient.” Some say a can of beans is a processed, convenience food. By a strict definition like that, so are ketchup and peanut butter. But to me, and those of us just trying to feed our people, ingredients are the building blocks to make a meal, and something we wouldn’t typically serve on its own.

• Convenience and prepared foods aren’t often the healthiest and verge toward junk food. Think frozen dinners, cereals, snack foods. Anything that gives you a shortcut to preparation—pre-assembled, pre-portioned, made shelf-stable through preservatives, etc—means a higher cost to the point of being stupid expensive.

  For an example, compare the cost of pre-portioned packets of instant oatmeal to a canister of quick oats. The packets are double the price.

  

• Maintaining an ingredient pantry means that I have the components for making a huge variety of meals, just in an unassembled form. That extra step of cooking from scratch requires some advanced thought and planning. (Sometimes I’m not motivated enough to make it, and in the case of sweets and junk food, that’s not always a bad thing.)

• When I use ingredients, any version that I make will undoubtedly be healthier than what is readily available to buy. For example, my go-to custard-style ice cream recipe is milk, eggs, sugar, flour, vanilla, and cream. No gums, colors, soybean oil, etc.

• Ingredients are multi-purpose. Cornmeal can become cornbread, fried mush, hush puppies, pancakes, fried fish batter, muffins, etc. Think of all the ways to cook a potato. Hamburger Helper will forever be Hamburger Helper and a box of granola bars will always be just that.

• However, it also means that when I don’t have staple ingredients on hand, I’m basically handicapped and can’t make anything else similar. If I’m missing a crucial ingredient and can’t make biscuits to go along with dinner, I probably can’t make cornbread or focaccia and I can’t switch gears and just make pancakes for dinner, either.

By the way, this article is not one of those “Perfection and How I Attained It: Five Simple Steps to Become Like Me.” Hardly. It’s partly because I’ve gotten sloppy lately and need to get myself back on track that this topic is on my mind. Since I ALWAYS keep sugar and baking soda on hand, I assume it’s there and forget to check my stock. And when I never check, oddly enough, I can run out of things and only discover it mid-recipe. And then life suddenly isn’t so fun.

Running to the store for that one item and then having to go again two days later for one more thing gets old fast. So I’ve been evaluating my pantry to determine the exact foods I expect to find in my pantry at all times. Variety is fun, but there are ingredients I use nearly daily. I’m dusting off (and updating) my inventory list of pantry must-haves. I use it to double-check my pantry every time I make a grocery order or shopping list.

• I prep ahead–in a way. I don’t do those big batch meal prep days and make dozens of meals for my freezer. I find them exhausting and often don’t like the results. But once a week or so, I’ll make a double batch of whatever I’m already making that I can freeze to use in the next couple of weeks. It could be flour tortillas, meatballs, muffins, gnocchi, or enchilada sauce. Just having one component of a meal ready seems to save a lot of time the next time around.

• I have tried and true staple recipes, things that I can make with barely a check at the ingredient list and others I don’t even need to look at anymore. Pinterest can show me a million recipes for the “best biscuits ever” but I’m not tempted to try any of them anymore; I have a recipe my family and I are happy with.

  While I love variety and trying new recipes, they often take extra time and concentration. Having a solid repertoire of meals in my rotation gives me that bandwidth to experiment. (note to self: compile my staple recipes. Would anyone else be interested in them?)

  

• I’m not so rigid about it that the system stops working for me. If you peeked into my pantry right now, you’d see boxes of macaroni and cheese, clearly not an ingredient. Is from-scratch mac & cheese better, healthier, and relatively easy? Of course. But when a day goes sideways I don’t need to spend my time and mental energy whipping up a bechamel sauce. It might not be much healthier, but it’s less expensive than Door Dash.

• Like I mentioned in this article, just because you can make something from scratch, doesn’t always mean it saves you money or is worth your time. Maybe there’s an easier alternative. Most of the time, it makes more sense to buy doughnuts rather than devote half a day to make them from scratch. Even better, though, I can spend 20 minutes making a coffee cake or scones instead and my family is just as happy.

• We just don’t eat many treats and snacks. Because they take time and effort to make, they’re for weekends and special occasions. I focus on meals instead of all day grazing and mindless snacking.

In a future week, I’ll share how this looks in real life.

I’m the co-author of A Housewife Writes and author of Two Years as an Amish Schoolteacher, available on Amazon. (affiliate link) I love history and learning about the lives of our grandmothers who loved their families and managed their households. I share their stories and wisdom that are still meaningful as well as ways of keeping a modern home in the spirit of past times.

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