Gabrielle Hamilton’s grocery list

Start with champagne or an excellent cava or prosecco. If you just drop a silver spoon into the neck of the bottle after you’ve opened it, so the stem hangs down in the bottle and the bowl of the spoon sits at the mouth, all the bubbles will collect to the metal and won’t escape. The champagne will stay fizzy for days.

A dozen eggs in your fridge, to me, are like a survival kit. I have poached eggs many times in the boiling water for 99-cent ramen noodles and put them on top of the noodles with the seasoning packet ingredients.

Keep a few potent, store-bought, Asian flavoring pastes in their condiments shelf in the fridge. These tend to have almost indefatigable expiration dates. These could be tom yum paste, or green curry paste or red curry paste or lemongrass and garlic or even dark and blonde miso pastes. I have blended a teaspoon of these pastes into soft room-temperature butter and then spread on toast or over warm steamed broccoli. Add them to canned chicken broth to make instant soup, or mix them with sour cream to dip celery and radishes and cucumbers into. They can also be great in olive oil and lemon juice to baste onto fish or chicken, or drizzled over certain salads. Stirred into hot, sticky rice—well, that is probably what they were made for. And with a fried egg on top of the spicy sticky rice, you’ve got “survival-kit basic” bibimbap.

If a woman could keep a pound of butter in the freezer and a few choice boxes of frozen vegetables—and I would splurge on the fancy name brands of frozen veggies, not the discount store brand—she could really put something together that looks and feels like a meal. I always keep spinach, corn and peas in the freezer.

Always have one of each citrus: a lemon and an orange and a lime. If a woman wants to put orange peel in her olive oil and a few chili flakes and sprinkle that over the cooked frozen spinach—it has a kind of Sicilian slant. Or, if she sprinkled lime juice and salt and cayenne pepper on the corn, it would have a Tex-Mex, Southwestern bent. And a bowl of hot buttered peas with a glass of champagne is a meal I could enjoy any night. The lemon juice, just a squeeze, helps to brighten up any possible “frozen” or “freezer” taste that can occur in these veggies.

If it’s not going overboard, some celery, onion and garlic in every fridge opens everything up even wider. These are the “undergarments” of a thousand dishes.