With the next few days in mind, I did a quick inventory of my in-laws\u2019 store cupboard. And while I enjoy capers, white marzipan, sardines, dried dates and cannellini beans in their own way, 72 hours suddenly felt like a lifetime. Spotting a pouch of Merchant Gourmet Spanish-style grains, I briefly flirted with the idea of hiding it in another cupboard for leverage, before accepting that might be a bad vibe. Had we been at home, it would have been coconut milk, Jaffa cakes and various seeds.<\/p>\n
No cooking required \u2026 Meera Sodha\u2019s vegan chickpea, tomato and cucumber salad. Photograph: Louise Hagger\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
Despite government advice, I had planned to avoid Tesco, assuming it would be overrun by panicked locals and denuded shelves. There\u2019s a logic to panic shopping in times of panic, but we\u2019re not there yet, guys! If we start rapidly changing our buying habits, we risk dismantling an already precarious system that can adapt only so much. The so-called doom boom \u2013 the surge in doomsday prepping \u2013 will make things only worse; one person\u2019s stockpile is another person\u2019s shortage. It\u2019s worth remembering that local community resilience matters much more than any fancy bunker planning.<\/p>\n
Still, fear can be powerful, which is probably why I\u2019ve made a list of things we should add to our next few shops. I\u2019m aiming for a more \u201cdeep-pantry\u201d method: buying two or three extra items a week max, and only what we\u2019d want to eat tomorrow. There is something strangely relaxing about pulling together a no-cook dinner from a more prudent shopping excursion, particularly with all-year salads. Meera Sodha\u2019s no-cook chickpea and tomato salad<\/a> is a winner at mine even if there\u2019s no power cut. I love the idea of Harumi Kurihara\u2019s Hijiki seaweed salad<\/a> because I have most of the ingredients, and in retrospect I probably could have made Anna Berrill\u2019s sardine and celery salad<\/a> this week. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall\u2019s recipe for sardine and red onion salad<\/a> takes five minutes to cobble together.<\/p>\n Other than that, if I learned anything from those eight long hours out here, it\u2019s the following: sweetened condensed milk can be both a pudding and a coffee whitener; got kids? Get UHT milk for cereal; most prepper-friendly meals tend to come from canned food, but think about pouches, too; think first in, first out, and place new food at the back of the cupboard or fridge, so you eat the older stuff first; think about food not as an add-on but as the whole meal (canned smoked mussels go well with canned white beans, say); and, finally, if you really want chips, make sure you have a cooking stove, and consider planting potatoes. They are weirdly easy to grow.<\/p>\n My week in foodScarce \u2026 cornichons are perfect in a variety of sandwiches. Photograph: imageBROKER\/Alamy<\/p>\n Sandwich saint | It\u2019s been over six months since Pret stopped selling its only good sandwich, the jambon beurre, due to a possible cornichon shortage<\/a>. I\u2019ve spent almost all that time perfecting my own version using ingredients from Lidl. Then, the other week, I got a tip-off that chef Pascal Wiedemann at Pompette<\/a> in Oxford makes the best version, not least because every single element \u2013 baguette, ham, cornichons, butter, dijon mustard \u2013 is made in-house. It takes him three days from start to finish, and they sell it every day! I\u2019m particularly excited by the ham, which comes from the Tamworth pigs at nearby Paddock Farm<\/a>. I\u2019m off to Oxford next week, so will report back.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Feast<\/p>\n Recipes from all our star cooks, seasonal eating ideas and restaurant reviews. Get our best food writing every week<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Flying solo | I\u2019m very much married with children, but have been vicariously enjoying Eli Davies\u2019 The Spinster Cookbook<\/a>. Memoirs and recipes always make the best reading, though don\u2019t buy this if you want only recipes \u2013 the first one, about drinking vodka and \u201cfancified\u201d toast, doesn\u2019t land for about 70 pages. It\u2019s more of a manifesto for single women that follows Davies\u2019 relationship to cooking and domesticity as a single woman in a family-size world. Imagine Katharine Whitehorn scarfing Kettle Chips over the sink, and you\u2019re halfway there.<\/p>\n TV dinners | I have become quietly fascinated by the contestants\u2019 eating habits on The Traitors<\/a>. The way they balance plates of lasagne and chopped salad on their laps. The sheer quantity of toast and juice consumed at breakfast \u2013 and why no one touches the pastries (according to previous contestants, they\u2019re stale<\/a>). I did a deep dive on Reddit to find out what\u2019s in those jars in the kitchen, and can confirm: Skittles, dried apricots, dates and Haribo gummies.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1793286851_98_2998.jpg\")
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