What to cook when there's nothing in the fridge

The structure of an empty-fridge meal

Nearly all of them are the same three things: a starch you already have, a fat, and something sharp or salty to stop it being dull. Rice, ghee, pickle. Pasta, olive oil, chilli. Besan, oil, onion. That is the whole architecture.

What is missing from that list is protein, vegetables and anything fresh. Those are what make a meal feel complete, which is why an empty fridge feels like defeat. But they are the negotiable part, not the load-bearing part.

• A starch: rice, atta, besan, pasta, bread, poha, rava, noodles
• A fat: ghee, butter, oil, and ideally one you can brown
• Something sharp or salty: lemon, pickle, soy sauce, vinegar, chilli, curd
• Aromatics if you have them: onion, garlic, ginger, dried chillies

Six meals that need almost nothing

These are ordered by how little they require. The first needs three ingredients.

• Dal chawal. Dal, rice, ghee, cumin, garlic. Twenty-five minutes and the floor of Indian cooking.
• Besan chilla. Besan, water, an onion. Fifteen minutes, high protein, no fresh produce required.
• Aglio e olio. Pasta, garlic, olive oil, chilli. Fifteen minutes, and it is genuinely good rather than merely survivable.
• Pithla. Besan whisked into water with garlic and chillies. Maharashtrian, twenty minutes, built precisely for this.
• Garlic fried rice with a fried egg. Yesterday's rice, ten cloves of garlic, one egg.
• Tomato egg stir fry. Eggs, tomatoes, and a spoon of sugar. The Chinese home cook's answer to the same problem.

The pantry that removes the problem

If this situation happens often, it is a shopping pattern rather than a cooking problem. A small set of things keeps almost indefinitely and turns an empty fridge into an inconvenience rather than a crisis.

Dals and rice keep for a year. Besan keeps six months and makes chilla, pithla, kadhi and pakoras. Onions, potatoes and garlic keep for weeks outside the fridge. Eggs keep three weeks. Frozen peas are better than fresh for most cooked dishes and last months.

Add tinned tomatoes and tinned chickpeas and you have covered most of a month's dinners without a single fresh purchase.

The five-minute audit

Before deciding there is nothing to eat, look in this order, because it is the order of usefulness rather than the order of visibility.

The cupboard first, because that is where the meal actually is. Then the freezer, which almost always holds peas, and often ginger, chillies and bread. Then the fridge door, where the pickles, sauces and mustard live. The main body of the fridge, the part everyone opens first and despairs at, is genuinely the least useful shelf in the kitchen for this purpose.

• Cupboard: rice, dal, pasta, besan, rava, poha, tinned tomatoes, tinned beans
• Freezer: peas, sweetcorn, bread, ginger, green chillies, leftover rice
• Fridge door: pickle, mustard, soy sauce, ketchup, jam, cheese
• Counter: onions, potatoes, garlic, lemons, bananas

Eggs are the escape hatch

If there are eggs, there is dinner, and there is very little argument about it. Eggs go with every starch in the list above and they cook in three minutes.

Rice and an egg is a meal. Bread and an egg is a meal. Noodles and an egg is a meal. Leftover anything with an egg on top is, by convention that nobody voted on but everybody accepts, a meal.

Keep more eggs than you think you need. They last three weeks and they are the single highest-value thing in an emergency kitchen.

What to stop doing

Do not shop for recipes. Shopping for a specific dish means buying half a bunch of something you will use once, which is how fridges fill with things that rot rather than things that combine.

Buy the same twenty ingredients repeatedly and learn ten dishes that use them in different arrangements. It is less interesting as a shopping trip and considerably more interesting as a week of dinners.