The shelf

The method has three parts, and this is the first. The shelf is the short list of things that keep, bought without deciding, so that "there's nothing in" is never true.

What's on it. Pasta and rice, or whichever of those you'll actually eat. Potatoes, which keep for weeks in a dark cupboard. Onions and garlic. Tinned tomatoes, several. A tin or two of beans or chickpeas. Eggs. A hard cheese that keeps. Oil, salt, pepper, and one or two things that make food taste of something, a jar of pesto, a bottle of soy sauce, a lemon, stock cubes, a tube of tomato purée, chilli flakes. In the freezer, peas, spinach or sweetcorn, and one or two of the things you like that freeze, a bag of prawns, some chicken, fish, sausages. Bread, in the freezer too if you're one person. Butter. That's the shelf. It fits in one cupboard and one drawer of the freezer and it makes twenty dinners.

The standing shop. Once a week, at the same time, you look at the shelf and replace what's gone. It's a five-minute list because it's always the same list, and it can be done online with the last order repeated. The point is that it isn't decided. You don't shop for a meal. You shop for the shelf, and the meals come out of the shelf on the nights they're wanted. The fresh things, the pepper and the salad and the things that go off, are extras you add if you'll use them that week, and if you don't, the shelf still has dinner in it.

What it's for. The shelf makes every plain plate possible on every night. It isn't a menu. It's the ingredients for the six, which is chapter 20, and it's the reason the seven o'clock question has an answer in the cupboard rather than only on the phone.

The Eatwell Guide, as chapter 11 said, counts frozen, tinned and dried alongside fresh. The shelf leans on that. A kitchen with a stocked shelf and an empty fridge can make dinner. A kitchen with a full fridge and no shelf usually can't, because the fridge is parts and the shelf is the thing that turns parts into a plate.