Because having a cupboard full of food is one thing. Knowing how to turn it into dinner is quite another.
There’s been plenty of talk lately about emergency preparedness. Governments are encouraging households to keep essential supplies, social media is full of emergency pantry lists, and suddenly everyone seems to be discussing how many tins of beans we should have in the cupboard.
Now, I’m all for being prepared.
But as a nutritionist, kitchen gardener and mum who spends a considerable amount of time thinking about what to feed everyone, I have one rather practical question:
What are we actually going to cook with all this food?
Because a tin of beans and a fork might keep you going for a meal, but it’s hardly an inspiring family dinner plan.
And if you’re preparing for seven days without your usual shopping, electricity or water supply, there’s rather more to consider than how many packets of pasta you own.
This is where I think two ideas come together beautifully: the Emergency Pantry and the Living Pantry.
One helps you prepare for unexpected disruptions. The other makes everyday family cooking easier, more affordable and less wasteful.
Together, they can make your household considerably more resilient.
What Is an Emergency Pantry?
An emergency pantry is a collection of food and essential supplies that can help your household manage when normal services are interrupted.
That might mean a power outage, severe weather, flooding, a road closure, an unexpected illness or simply being unable to get to the shops.
It doesn’t need to resemble a survival bunker.
For most families, a practical emergency pantry contains familiar foods that store well, require relatively little preparation and can be turned into meals everyone will actually eat.
Think:
- Tinned tomatoes, beans, lentils and vegetables
- Rice, pasta, couscous and oats
- Tinned fish, chicken or other shelf-stable protein foods
- UHT milk and shelf-stable milk alternatives
- Crackers, crispbreads and other ready-to-eat staples
- Peanut butter, nuts and seeds
- Cooking oil, stock, herbs and spices
- A few family favourites for comfort and familiarity
But there’s an important distinction.
Food that stores well isn’t necessarily food that’s easy to prepare during an emergency.
Dried beans, for example, are excellent pantry staples. They’re affordable, versatile and nutritious.
But they also require water, soaking and potentially lengthy cooking.
That’s perfectly fine on a normal Tuesday.
It’s considerably less convenient when you’re trying to conserve drinking water and cook on a small camping stove.
Which brings me to the Living Pantry.
What Is a Living Pantry?
My Living Pantry philosophy is simple: keep food you regularly use, use what you keep, and replenish it as you go.
Rather than filling a cupboard with emergency supplies that sit untouched for years, your everyday pantry becomes part of your household’s preparation.
The same tinned tomatoes you use for a quick pasta sauce can form the base of an emergency meal.
The rice you regularly cook with can become fried rice, a rice bowl or a simple meal with tinned fish and vegetables.
The chickpeas you use in curries and salads can become a filling dinner with a handful of spices.
And those frozen vegetables you keep for busy evenings? They’re useful during the early stages of a power outage, provided they’ve remained safely chilled or frozen.
A Living Pantry also makes it easier to manage food rotation.
You know what you’ve got, you know how to cook it, and you’re less likely to discover a mysterious tin at the back of the cupboard that expired during the previous decade.
The goal isn’t to buy more food for the sake of it.
It’s to make the food you already buy work harder.
The Question Everyone Forgets: How Will You Cook?
This is the part of emergency preparation that deserves more attention.
Imagine you’ve stocked your pantry with pasta, rice, dried beans and lentils.
Excellent.
Now imagine the electricity goes off.
How much of that food can you prepare?
If your household relies on an electric cooktop, oven, kettle or microwave, you may suddenly find your options rather limited.
Before building an emergency pantry, I think every household should answer four questions:
1. Do we have a safe alternative cooking method?
This might be a camping stove, an outdoor barbecue or another suitable appliance.
Always follow the manufacturer’s instructions. Portable gas stoves, barbecues and fuel-powered generators must not be used inside the home, garage or other enclosed spaces because of the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning.
2. Do we have enough safe water?
Water isn’t just for drinking.
It’s also needed for preparing food, washing hands, cleaning utensils and cooking ingredients such as rice and pasta.
A cupboard full of dried beans is less useful if you don’t have enough safe water to prepare them.
3. Can we prepare meals without refrigeration?
If the power is out for an extended period, fresh meat, dairy products and refrigerated leftovers may no longer be safe to eat.
It’s worth having meals that rely entirely on shelf-stable ingredients.
4. What can we eat without cooking at all?
This is particularly important.
Every emergency pantry should contain some ready-to-eat foods that require no heating, minimal preparation and little or no additional water.
Crackers with peanut butter, canned fish, ready-to-eat beans, fruit cups and shelf-stable foods can be extremely useful.
Not every meal needs to be a culinary masterpiece.
Sometimes being able to feed everyone safely, quickly and without fuss is the most important thing.
Seven Family Meals You Can Make From Pantry Staples
Rather than thinking about emergency supplies as individual ingredients, I prefer to think in terms of complete meals.
Here are seven practical options using foods you may already have.
1. Tomato, Bean and Vegetable Pasta
Pantry ingredients: Pasta, tinned tomatoes, canned beans, dried herbs, stock and tinned vegetables.
Cook the pasta using your available cooking equipment.
In a separate pan, warm the tomatoes with drained beans, vegetables and herbs. Toss everything together.
If you’re conserving fuel, choose smaller pasta shapes that cook relatively quickly, or use a suitable quick-cooking alternative.
No cooking available? Use ready-to-eat beans with tinned vegetables and a little olive oil instead. Save the pasta for when you have a safe cooking method.
2. Corned Beef Hash
Pantry ingredients: Tinned corned beef, canned potatoes, onions or dried onion, and seasonings.
Drain the potatoes and chop them into bite-sized pieces.
Warm them in a frying pan with a little oil, add the corned beef and cook until heated through and lightly browned.
If you’ve got fresh onions, use them. Otherwise, dried onion and a few herbs will do nicely.
It’s hearty, filling and requires only one pan.
You can also use canned vegetables to bulk it out.
3. Chickpea and Tomato Curry
Pantry ingredients: Canned chickpeas, tinned tomatoes, coconut milk, curry powder and rice or couscous.
Combine the drained chickpeas, tomatoes, coconut milk and curry powder in a saucepan.
Simmer until hot and the flavours have combined.
Serve with rice if you have sufficient water and fuel, or choose couscous for a quicker accompaniment.
You can add canned peas, carrots or spinach if available.
It’s a good example of how a few inexpensive ingredients can become a satisfying family meal.
4. Tuna and White Bean Salad
Pantry ingredients: Tinned tuna, canned white beans, olive oil, vinegar, dried herbs and canned vegetables.
Drain the tuna and beans.
Combine with a little olive oil, vinegar and herbs. Add any suitable vegetables you have available.
Serve with crackers or crispbread.
This is one of my favourite emergency pantry options because it requires no cooking at all.
It’s also a useful everyday lunch.
5. Pantry Fried Rice
Pantry ingredients: Shelf-stable ready-to-eat rice, canned vegetables, tinned fish or another shelf-stable protein, soy sauce and cooking oil.
Heat a little oil in a frying pan.
Add the vegetables and protein, followed by the rice. Stir until thoroughly heated and season with soy sauce.
Ready-to-eat rice is particularly useful when cooking water is limited.
Check the packet instructions, as some products require heating and others can be eaten without it.
If using freshly cooked rice, follow normal food safety practices: cool and refrigerate it promptly when storing, and don’t leave it sitting at room temperature.
6. Quick Lentil Soup
Pantry ingredients: Canned lentils, tinned tomatoes, stock, dried herbs and canned vegetables.
Combine everything in a saucepan with enough safe water or ready-made stock to achieve your preferred consistency.
Simmer until heated through.
Serve with crackers or bread if available.
Canned lentils are particularly handy because they’re already cooked.
They give you the convenience of legumes without the long cooking time.
7. Pantry Paella-Inspired Rice
Pantry ingredients: Rice, canned tomatoes, canned peas, tinned fish, stock and smoked paprika.
Cook the rice with the tomatoes, stock and seasonings, following the liquid requirements for your chosen rice.
Add the peas and fish towards the end, heating everything thoroughly.
It’s not traditional paella, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise.
But it’s a wonderfully practical way to turn a handful of pantry staples into a colourful family meal.
And in our house, that’s exactly the sort of cooking I love.
What If You Have No Power at All?
If you have no safe way to heat food, your priorities change.
You need meals that are ready to eat, require little washing up and don’t rely on refrigeration.
A few combinations worth keeping in mind include:
- Tuna, canned beans and crackers
- Peanut butter on crispbread
- Ready-to-eat chickpeas with olive oil and seasonings
- Tinned fruit with nuts or seeds
- Shelf-stable milk with ready-to-eat cereal
- Canned vegetables with tinned fish and crackers
Choose products that are safe to eat straight from the packaging, and follow their storage instructions.
For families with young children, think about familiar foods that are easy to serve and appropriate for their age.
A disruption is stressful enough without discovering that your emergency menu consists entirely of foods nobody likes.
The Water Problem
Water deserves its own place in any emergency food plan.
In Australia, the general emergency preparedness benchmark is at least three litres of drinking water per person per day, with additional water needed for cooking, hygiene, hot weather and individual needs.
For a family of four, that’s at least 84 litres for seven days just at that baseline.
And that’s before you’ve started boiling pasta, rinsing rice or washing dishes.
This is why I like having a mixture of foods that require different amounts of preparation.
For example:
- Canned beans need much less preparation water than dried beans.
- Ready-to-eat rice can reduce cooking time and water requirements.
- Couscous generally requires less cooking than many other grains.
- Tinned vegetables don’t need washing or lengthy cooking.
- Ready-to-eat meals are useful when both water and fuel are limited.
If you store water in tanks or containers, make sure they’re suitable for drinking water, clean and maintained, and that you have a reliable way to assess and treat water if its safety is uncertain.
Water purification tablets can be useful when used according to their instructions, but they don’t make chemically contaminated water safe.
Don’t Forget Food Safety
During an emergency, it’s tempting to focus entirely on having enough food.
But food safety matters just as much.
A few principles are worth remembering:
Keep the fridge and freezer doors closed during a power outage.
A closed refrigerator will generally keep food cold for around four hours. A full freezer may maintain a safe temperature for approximately 48 hours, or 24 hours if half full, provided the door stays closed.
These are estimates, not guarantees. Actual food safety depends on temperature and conditions.
Don’t rely on smell or appearance alone.
Food can contain harmful bacteria without looking or smelling spoiled.
Avoid storing opened canned food without refrigeration.
Once opened, perishable foods need to be handled and stored appropriately. Where refrigeration isn’t available, prepare quantities you can eat safely at the time.
Be careful with rice.
Cooked rice requires particular attention to safe cooling and storage because of the risk of Bacillus cereus.
Keep hygiene simple but effective.
Safe water, clean hands, clean utensils and appropriate food handling are essential, especially when normal services are disrupted.
If in doubt about whether perishable food has remained at a safe temperature, don’t take unnecessary risks.
Building a Seven-Day Pantry Without Buying Everything Twice
You don’t need to rush out and purchase an entirely separate collection of emergency food.
Start with what your family already eats.
Look at your regular dinners and identify the ingredients that can be stored safely without refrigeration.
Then ask yourself:
- Which meals could I make entirely from shelf-stable ingredients?
- Which would require a stove or another source of heat?
- Which could be prepared without cooking?
- How much safe water would I need?
- Do I have enough for everyone in the household?
- Would my children actually eat these meals?
From there, gradually increase your supplies where needed.
If you normally use two tins of tomatoes a week, keeping a few extras makes sense.
If your family regularly eats rice, pasta, chickpeas or tuna, those are sensible ingredients to rotate through your pantry.
And if nobody in the house likes a particular emergency food, don’t buy a dozen tins simply because it appeared on somebody else’s preparedness checklist.
Your pantry should work for your family.
The Garden Has a Role Too — But It Isn’t the Whole Answer
As a kitchen gardener, I love the idea of being able to step outside and collect fresh herbs, greens and vegetables.
A productive garden can certainly add variety and freshness to everyday meals.
But gardens are seasonal.
They can be affected by frost, drought, storms, pests and the occasional determined rabbit.
And in the Southern Highlands, November can apparently still involve frost blankets and milk-carton covers for the vegetables!
So while my garden is an important part of our Living Pantry, I wouldn’t rely on it as our only source of food during an emergency.
Instead, I see the garden, pantry, freezer and preserved foods as complementary parts of a more resilient kitchen.
Fresh produce when it’s available.
Preserved food when there’s a surplus.
Reliable pantry staples when the garden isn’t producing.
And a few ready-to-eat options for when cooking isn’t possible.
My Approach: Prepare for Real Life, Not the Worst Imaginable Scenario
I don’t believe emergency preparation needs to be frightening or expensive.
And I certainly don’t think we need to turn our homes into warehouses of food we’ll never use.
For me, it’s about making sensible decisions that help our family manage everyday life as well as unexpected disruptions.
A well-stocked pantry makes busy evenings easier.
It helps reduce food waste.
It gives you more flexibility when plans change.
It can save mone