What I Actually Keep in My Kitchen: The Seven-Ingredient System Behind Daily Cooking

The Lie Most Cooking Content Tells

Most cooking content shows you photogenic meals at peak presentation and implies that's how the cook eats. That isn't how anyone eats, including the people who write the cooking content. The real version of daily home cooking is much less impressive and much more achievable: a small list of ingredients you always have, a weekly habit that turns those ingredients into a base for the rest of the week, and a couple of tired-night fallback meals when none of that energy is available.

This is the version of cooking I do. It's not glamorous. It works.

The Seven Things I Always Have

These are the ingredients I will always, without exception, have in my kitchen:

1. Carrots
2. Shallots
3. Garlic
4. Celery
5. Chicken leg quarters
6. Limes
7. Chilis (whatever variety I can get — habanero, Thai bird, jalapeño)

Plus a few more I rotate by season but treat as essentially permanent:

• Bell peppers (a mix of red, orange, yellow)
• Chicken broth — but the homemade kind, made from the first five items on the list above

That's the core. Everything else in my kitchen is variable. Proteins beyond chicken, leafy greens, fresh herbs, specialty vegetables, all rotate based on what looks good at the store and what I'm in the mood to cook. But the seven-plus list is always there.

The reason these are the staples isn't that I love every one of them. It's that together they build the foundation that almost every dish I make starts from. Garlic, shallot, chili — that's the start of a stir fry, a soup, a sauté, a dressing. Carrots and celery — that's the start of a stock, a braise, a soup. Lime — that's the brightness that finishes almost any Vietnamese or Mexican-inflected dish. Chicken leg quarters — that's the protein, but also the broth, but also the leftover meat for tomorrow.

The Trick: One Batch of Broth Becomes Five Dinners

Here's the system, and it's the actual reason I can cook every night without losing my mind.

At the beginning of the week, I make a big pot of chicken broth. The ingredients are the first five items on the staples list: carrots, shallots, garlic, celery, and chicken leg quarters. Cover with water, simmer for a few hours, salt to taste, done. That's the entire recipe.

I don't throw the chicken away when the broth is done. The chicken meat from the leg quarters comes off the bones and goes into a container in the fridge. That meat is the actual foundation of the week. Here's what it becomes over the next few days:

• Chicken scampi. Sauté the cooked chicken in olive oil with a lot of garlic, lemon, butter, parsley, and pasta. Twenty minutes from cold to plated.
• Chicken noodle soup. Use the broth I just made plus the chicken meat plus fresh carrots and celery. Add egg noodles. Ten minutes once everything's prepped.
• Chicken wraps. Cooked chicken, tortilla, lettuce, some kind of sauce, whatever vegetables I have. Five minutes.
• Chicken gỏi cuốn. Vietnamese spring rolls with the chicken instead of shrimp or pork. Rice paper, vermicelli, herbs, the chicken, nuốc chấm. No cooking required — just assembly.
• Chicken salads. Cold chicken on greens with whatever dressing matches the rest of the meal.

Five dinners. One pot of broth. The work happens once at the start of the week, and the rest of the week the work is finishing dishes that are already half done.

This is the unsexy truth about daily home cooking. You don't cook five completely new dinners. You cook a few hours of foundational work on day one, and then you spend most of the week assembling and finishing. The broth and the cooked chicken are the assembly toolkit.

The Tired-Night Meals (Which Are Most Nights)

The system above sounds organized because it is. But not every night fits into it. Sometimes I'm tired, or I didn't make broth that week, or the cooked chicken is gone by Thursday. Those are tired-night nights, and they have their own short list:

Fried bologna sandwich. This is the most honest thing I'll ever write about how I eat. When I'm tired and I just need to eat something hot, I fry a slice of bologna — or turkey, or ham, whatever sliced meat is in the fridge — in a hot pan until the edges crisp up and curl. Slap it on bread with whatever condiments are in the fridge. Mustard, mayo, hot sauce, sometimes all three. It takes four minutes. It's not pretty. It's not impressive. It is genuinely one of the things I eat regularly, and I'm not going to pretend I don't.

Scrambled eggs. Same energy. Three eggs in a pan with butter, salt, pepper. Toast if I have it, no toast if I don't. Five minutes.

These aren't recipes. They're not meant to be Instagrammable. They're the meals that fill the gap between "I have the energy to actually cook" and "I'm going to order takeout I'll regret." Every cook I know who actually cooks daily has some version of this list. Mine is fried bologna and scrambled eggs. Yours might be peanut butter toast or instant ramen with an egg cracked in. The specific meal doesn't matter. What matters is that you have one or two of them ready to go without thinking, so you don't end up ordering DoorDash because the alternative felt like too much effort.

What I Don't Keep

People ask sometimes if there are kitchen gadgets I avoid. The honest answer is no — I don't have strong opinions about gadgets I refuse to own. I just have what I use. A few good knives, a couple of cast iron pans, a stainless skillet, a rice cooker (two, actually — see the rice post), a stock pot, an Instant Pot for slow-cooking. That's most of what I reach for.

What I don't keep is more about ingredients than equipment. I don't keep a lot of specialty sauces. I don't have a pantry full of jarred Italian condiments. I don't keep three different types of vinegar when one bottle of rice vinegar handles 90% of what I need. I'm not against any of those things. I just don't reach for them often enough to justify the shelf space.

The two pantry items I reach for most often are fish sauce and soy sauce. Between those two, plus the seven staples above, plus salt and pepper and olive oil, I can make most of the dishes I cook on a regular week. Everything else is augmentation, not foundation.

Why the Short List Works

The reason this system works is that I'm not trying to cook seven different cuisines a week. I'm cooking dishes that come from a relatively small overlap of Vietnamese, American, and "stuff that uses what I have." Those three cuisines share most of their building blocks. Onion, garlic, chili, citrus, chicken, salt, fat. Every dish I cook is some recombination of those, with a few specific accents that change based on which direction I'm going.

If I tried to keep a pantry that could handle Vietnamese, Italian, Mexican, French, Japanese, Indian, and Thai cooking all in the same week, my kitchen would be a mess and most of the ingredients would expire before I used them. Instead, I keep a short list that handles the cooking I actually do, and I rely on the variable ingredients I buy each week to give me the variety.

That's the lesson of this post if there's one to take away: the goal isn't to have everything. The goal is to have the few things you'll actually use, set up so that one cooking session at the start of the week becomes the foundation for the next five days. The pantry isn't the system. The pantry is the input to the system. The system is the broth on Sunday that becomes scampi on Monday and noodle soup on Wednesday and gỏi cuốn on Friday.

And on the night nothing in the system is working — a fried bologna sandwich, and zero shame about it.