With a well-stocked storecupboard, who needs to trek through the blizzard for groceries?

The snow is thick on the ground, you can’t get the car out of the drive and your local shop has sold out of bread and milk… what are you going to serve up for supper? It’s time to rifle through your storecupboard.

My top three storecupboard essentials all come in tins. If you’ve got tomatoes, fish and pulses in the larder, you can curl up by the fire, safe in the knowledge that your family won’t go hungry!

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Pasta has to be the ultimate convenience food. When I’m tired and haven’t got the energy to spend hours tinkering in the kitchen, I just reach into the store cupboard for a packet of dried pasta and fifteen minutes later, supper’s ready. The kids love it and it goes with just about everything, so its great for using up cooked meats and veggies and odd bits of cheese.

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The husband laughs at my obsessive list writing, but I have to write lists as my brain is like a sieve. Writing lists gives the illusion of being organised, even though I am apt to loose my notebook. Of course Christmas is the perfect excuse for indulging in lists – especially when it comes to food. Planning christmas meals and writing shopping lists gives me a fighting chance that with a bit of luck I won’t forget the bread sauce, and I’ll only buy what we need.

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OK, so how am I going to make two wrinkly courgettes, a couple of cooked chicken legs and some cheese into supper for tonight? This is the kind of question I end up asking myself every morning when I open the fridge. Should I close the door on the problem and hit the shops?

There must be loads of people who face the same dilemma every day – finding ways to make your budget stretch further means jazzing up your leftovers to feed a hungry family. Short of starving the kids, which I’m told is illegal, sometimes you are forced to create something out of nothing.
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Now that we are about to enter a recession, most of us can’t afford to throw away perfectly good food. I had a quick look around the web to see how other people are coping with the rising cost of food bills. Surprisingly, I didn’t find anything that showed me how to transform that bunch of black bananas into a million quid! However, I did find a family who’ve started tackling the problem…
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