5 Hardworking Kitchen Staples You Should Buy During Quarantine

Designated quarantine shoppers need to know the common items that should be on your shopping list. Is your household a fan of eggs? Do the cans of luncheon meat disappear quicker than the hot dogs? Then you need to be on the lookout for these specific items when you go to the store. 

You can always change your shopping list once you're in the store but there are some kitchen food that are more hardworking than others. These are the food that you use the most often. 

These are the big 5 kitchen staples that should make it in your grocery cart and into your kitchen:  

Photo by Riell Santos

1 Canned Meat 

These can include luncheon meat, corned beef, brined chicken chunks, tuna flakes, Vienna sausages, canned lechon, and sardines. Whichever is your favorite meat, we're sure you'll want to have these ingredients on hand at all times. These canned meats are fast and easy to use since these require no thawing, no additional seasoning, and are ready-to-eat straight from the can. 

These are can be the main meat of your dishes or you can add its flavor to whatever meat you are already cooking. You can make sopas with Vienna sausages, make corned beef baked macaroni, no-cook chicken tacos, monggo with Spam or other luncheon meats, and this fast and easy spicy tuna pasta. 

Photo by Dairy Darilag

2 Tomato Sauce or Paste 

Tomato sauce has to be one of the most important ingredients in your kitchen. You can make this into simple pasta sauces, make everything, from a classic chicken afritada and beef kaldereta to a easy pork mechado and chicken menudo. If tomato sauce is out of stock, reach for the tomato pastes. These are just as valuable as tomato sauce but has the added flavor-enhancing power that is created when the mixture is concentrated. Think of tomato paste as the bouillon cube of the tomato sauces.      

Plus, you can combine these with other delicious and handy staples too: corn, mushrooms, olives, or other canned or frozen food. 

3 Seasoning Packets and Marinade Mixes    

What's your favorite ulam? For every ulam that you can mention, we can probably find a seasoning packet or marinade mix that can make the sauce for it in the supermarket.

From the humble adobo to the numerous ingredients you need to make a kare-kare or even a Pinoy-style barbecue marinade, these spice blends and sauces can make cooking and preparing food a breeze.   

Photo by Pixabay

4 Cooking Oil 

Every kitchen needs cooking oil. However, did you know that you can do more than just cook with cooking oil? If you treat your cooking oil like you do expensive olive oil, you just opened up a whole new world of recipes that you can make at home. 

You can make salad dressings, hummus, oil-based pasta recipes, even confit or oil-poached food! What's even better is that oil can be used in baking, too. This extra moist chocolate cake is a fantastic example of a recipe that doesn't use butter in its recipe, and the result is one of the best chocolate cakes you will ever eat. 

  

Photo by ImageParty from Pixabay

5 Rice 

Every Pinoy who eats rice knows that this is the ultimate in kitchen staples. It's usually just steamed and served with your favorite ulam but if you have the right tools, you can do more than just make steamed rice or lugaw with it. 

If you have a blender or even a large mortar and pestle, you can grind these kernels of rice and make rice flour. This flour alone welcomes you to the exciting world of the different kinds of kakanin you can make, from the classic bibingka and puto to sapin sapin and the black kutsinta.      

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