Posted by kathryn in Shopping Basket

Announcing the Pantry Challenge

In a busy life eating well can sometimes be difficult.

Regular planning, shopping and cooking all take time and if you’re having a flat-out week these things get overlooked.

Without good food in your cupboards or freezer the tempting fall-back is take away and fast food.

If this is happening intermittently it’s not a problem . However if you’re regularly turning to take-away then your diet and health are suffering.

Cooking from the pantry

What if there were ingredients you could keep in the house to make a healthy meal? Ones with long, long sell-by dates. Foods that could just sit in your pantry or freezer, until needed. Then, when life was too busy you could pull them out and put together a quick, easy and healthy meal. With minimal fuss.

Well I think there are just such a group of foods. Ingredients you can keep long term. Ingredients that will give you a flavour-full meal. Fifteen foods that will even give you options and choice about what you make.

And I’m challenging you to help prove me right.

The ingredients

Here is a list of fifteen foods. These are basic ingredients you can keep in the pantry and fridge. They last a long time and most of you will have at least some of them already.

1. Olive oil
2. Tinned tomatoes
3. Tinned legumes or beans
4. Soy sauce
5. Frozen vegetables
6. Flour
7. Pasta
8. Tinned fish
9. Eggs
10. Rice
11. Bread
12. Vinegar
13. Fresh onions
14. One spice or spice mix
15. One dried herb or herb mix

If you have these foods in your house I think you could put together a healthy meal. In fact I think there are probably quite a number of different dishes you could make. All with just 15 ingredients.

The Pantry Challenge

So I’m setting a pantry challenge. To see how many different meals you and I can make from this one list.

Using all or some of the above 15 foods, what would you have for dinner?

The details

If you want to take part, here’s what you need to do:

• Make a meal using ingredients from the above list.
• I’ve allowed some flexibility in the list, for example you can choose your own herb, spice and so on. You don’t have to use all the ingredients but your recipes must only use these foods. No tweaking the list and no adding in extra sneaky ingredients. The point is for us to come up with a diversity of dishes from the same list.
• If you have a blog, post your recipe on your site and then send me an email. Please include a link back to this post, announcing the Pantry Challenge.
• If you don’t have a blog but still want to take part, then please do. You can email your recipe and any photos directly to me and I’ll include them in the round up.
• In your email please state your name, blog name (if you have a blog) and where you’re from. Include a link back to your blog post and feel free to also include a photograph of your dish.
• You can enter more than one recipe.
• The closing time and date for entries is 9.00am on Monday 29th September. Please note that’s 9.00am my time – ie Australian Eastern Standard Time. For many of you that’s still going to be Sunday night.
• Due to time constraints I won’t accept late submissions.
• I’ll post a round up of the recipes and entries during the week following the deadline.

Are you going to take part in the Pantry Challenge?

Photograph by Petre Birlea.

11 September, 2008