Thanks to everyone who joined for today’s Substack live cooking demo — if you couldn’t make it, find a full replay above!
In the demo, I cooked smoky mole chicken enchiladas with lime crema, a recipe that turns a few humble pantry staples (peanut butter, chocolate chips, tortillas, tomato paste, spices, and chipotles en adobo!) into a delicious weeknight dinner. The only fresh ingredients you’ll need are chicken breasts, white onion, a red bell pepper, some shredded cheese, sour cream, and a lime!
Recipes that rely heavily on pantry staples are easy to make on nights when the fridge is mostly bare — they can also be more budget-friendly, since the cost-per-use of ingredients like peanut butter and spices is often quite low.
Thank you to Thrive Market for sponsoring today’s live cook-along, which allowed us to make it free for all subscribers! Thank you also to Thrive for making it so very easy for me to keep my pantry stocked up with high-quality ingredients (at an excellent price point!).
In addition to pantry staples, Thrive is my go-to source for kids snacks and clean home products — I love that everything they sell is free from more than 1,000 artificial, synthetic, and GMO ingredients. I also LOVE their app and use it to immediately add ingredients to my cart as soon as I finish them, so that I don’t have to write them down or try to remember later.
Sign up here to get 30% off your first order (STOCK UP!) and a free $60 gift. Now’s a great time because everyone — new and existing members — can get 25% off many products right now during their Friends & Family sale, which runs through Saturday, May 2nd. Also FYI that new-to-Thrive What To Cook Insiders get $100 off their first four orders!
While we’re talking pantry staples, here are a handful of ingredients that pack a TON of flavor that I always keep on hand. We’ve linked WTC recipes to cook with each!
* Coconut milk — Coconut milk’s a great dairy-free sub for cream that you can use in curries, smoothies, and soups. In my house though, it’s most often used to make coconut rice!
* Chipotles en adobo — We used these smoky, spicy peppers today for our mole chicken enchiladas! You can also use them for chipotle black bean enchiladas and cheesy chipotle shrimp tacos. Rarely does a recipe use the whole can, so store your leftover peppers and sauce in an airtight bag in the freezer.
* Creamy peanut butter — My house is never without a jar! Again, we used it here in our mole sauce, but I also love mixing it with soy sauce, rice vinegar, and honey for a peanut sauce to serve on noodles or alongside potstickers. This peanut veggie curry is delightful, as are PB&Js, apples with peanut butter, smoothies bulked up with PB… the uses go on and on!
* Curry paste — Curry paste packs SO MUCH flavor into just one spoonful! Keep your pantry (or fridge, once you’ve opened it) stocked with red curry paste (Mike’s is my favorite) and you can cook thai chicken chops, one-pot pumpkin chickpea curry, and thai tofu curry noodle soup!
* Jarred marinara/tomato sauce — You could make a homemade marinara… or let someone do it for you! I’ve written many recipes with store-bought jarred marinara/tomato sauce listed as an ingredient because if you get a high-quality brand (my favorite is Rao’s), it really does taste homemade and will save you so much time and effort. Stock up on a jar to be able to cook 30-minute chicken Parm meatballs, messy meatball sliders, shortcut shakshuka, and 5-ingredient eggplant marinara.
What flavor-bomb ingredients is your pantry never without?!
For a complete rundown on what I consider to be a perfectly stocked pantry, click here. And for a fun take on this topic, read “If My Pantry Were to Disappear, Here’s What I’d Restock Immediately” — a Bon Appétit article written by Alaina Chou that I recently weighed in on!