Store Cupboard Cooking

Are you looking for inspiration for store cupboard cooking?  Want to know how to make beans taste nice?

We are in strange times for food shopping and cooking with everyone at home.

Most foods seem to be available (except flour and yeast) but I know people are spring cleaning their food cupboards and using up more dried goods.

Beans and lentils

Pulses can be seen as quite boring foods, but can form a big part of store cupboard cooking.

They are brilliant though for your gut bacteria and a really good sources of fibre.

Some need to be soaked overnight, and then boiled, or some of the smaller ones you can just boil for an hour or two. While we’re at home more during lockdown, we’ve got a little bit more time to prepare meals.

You can also by ready cooked packets of lentils.

Vegetables in jars

At the moment there are, there is fresh food a lot of fresh food in the shops including vegetables. If you want to think about how to preserve your intake of vegetables should this change here are a few hints:

• artichokes in a jar are really good. They are expensive, but they are amazing for your fibre intake (and I absolutely love them). Artichokes contain prebiotic fibre, which helps to feed the positive gut bacteria.
• pickled beetroot or cornichons (mini cucumbers) could be good if you like pickles.
• olives, are really good as well for adding a bit of flavour into your food. If you’ve got a bean or a lentil dish things that will make it a bit salty and a bit that umami flavour can help to make it a bit more interesting and palatable.

Tinned Fish

High in Omega 3 (an essential fatty acid which is great for brain health) many of the tinned fish are a good store cupboard staple.

• Little tins of anchovies are really good for adding depth of flavour to a tomato sauce.
• Sardines or tinned mackerel on toast is a great quick lunch.

No cheese available?

If you’re not a vegan you may not have discovered nutritional yeast.

If you can’t get hold of cheese, you can try adding these flakes to add flavour to your meals. It is sold in larger supermarkets.

• Sprinkle that on top of roasted vegetables.
• Use instead of cheese to make a white sauce.

Adding flavour

Spices are a good way to make beans more interesting.

Try curry powder, or cumin or something that’s going to add a bit of depth.

Ginger and garlic are brilliant for adding a little bit of variety and flavour to foods.

You can blend up and make a really nice Thai green curry by blending up things like garlic and ginger and a red pepper. And then, things like if you’ve got soy sauce, a little bit of chilli, you can blend those up into a homemade Thai red sauce to put over chicken, prawns or tofu.

Freezing fresh foods now

So if you’re able to access fresh food now and you’re worried about what might happen in the future you can freeze fresh produce.  ,

• Cut brown bananas and put them in the freezer.
• You can put chilis in the freezer and they will be okay to just cut up and put into a dish.

Fermenting foods – Grate up a cabbage put some salt in and then pack it in a jar to make sauerkraut.