What should I keep in for nights with no time?

Emergency meals fail not because the cupboard is empty but because it contains ingredients rather than meals. The fix is to stock backwards from specific dishes.

Step by step

1. Choose the meals first.Three or four you genuinely like and can cook without a recipe. Then buy for those. A cupboard stocked with general ingredients still leaves you deciding at seven o'clock.
2. Set a fifteen-minute limit.Anything longer is not an emergency meal. If it needs half an hour of attention on a bad evening, you will order a takeaway instead.
3. Build around a starch you always have.Dried pasta, rice, noodles, couscous or tinned potatoes. Long shelf life, quick to cook, and it makes anything else into a meal.
4. Keep tinned pulses and tomatoes.Chickpeas, beans, lentils and chopped tomatoes are the backbone of most fast meals. They need no preparation and keep for years.
5. Keep protein in the freezer.Frozen prawns, fish fillets, chicken pieces or mince, portioned. Frozen prawns in particular cook from frozen in a couple of minutes.
6. Keep frozen vegetables.Peas, spinach, sweetcorn, broad beans. Nutritionally comparable to fresh, never go off, and they turn a starch-and-tin meal into a proper one.
7. Keep the flavour shortcuts.Curry paste, pesto, harissa, gochujang, stock cubes, garlic and chilli. These do the work that time would otherwise do, and they are what stops fast food tasting thin.
8. Keep eggs.Probably the best emergency food there is. Omelette, fried egg on anything, shakshuka from a tin of tomatoes, egg fried rice from leftovers.
9. Keep something to finish with.Lemon, parmesan, chilli oil, yoghurt, herbs. A five-ingredient meal that gets a proper finish tastes considered rather than thrown together.
10. Freeze a few complete meals.Whenever you cook something that freezes well, portion a couple for the freezer. Labelled, dated, and treated as reserves rather than as everyday food.
11. Write the meals on the cupboard door.A short list. On a bad evening the problem is deciding, not cooking, and a list removes that entirely.
12. Protect the store.If the emergency ingredients get used for ordinary cooking, they are not there when needed. Either keep them separate or replace them immediately.
13. Rotate it.Use the oldest first and replace as you go. A cupboard of ten-year-old tins is a store nobody trusts.
14. Keep a genuine no-cook option.Good bread in the freezer, tinned fish, cheese, oatcakes. For the evenings when even fifteen minutes is too much.
15. Add it to the regular shop.Check the emergency list every few weeks as part of ordinary shopping, rather than as a separate task that never happens.

Tips

• Stock backwards from three or four specific meals. A cupboard of general ingredients still leaves you deciding.
• Write the list on the cupboard door. On a bad evening the decision is the hard part.
• Frozen prawns and eggs are the two fastest proteins there are.

Common mistakes

• Stockpiling tins without deciding what they make — A cupboard of unrelated ingredients does not answer the question of what to cook, which is the actual problem on a busy evening.
• Using the emergency store for ordinary cooking — It quietly empties, and the one evening you need it there is nothing there. Either keep it separate or replace items the same week.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask