 The average person would find it difficult to cook on a regular basis if they had to shop for ingredients every single day. So most people who cook frequently have certain basic ingredients in their kitchen at all times. These basics allow you to pull together a healthy, delicious meal in very little time, even if you happen to get home late from work. There are no hard and fast rules for what these ingredients should be, but whatever they are, they should be ingredients that support the flavors of the foods you enjoy eating, and they should be foods that will last in your kitchen, at least from one shopping trip to the next. In our house, these six basic ingredients are olive oil, onions, garlic, lemons, sugar, and salt. With these six ingredients on hand, it's not hard to transform just about any fresh food into a meal. These ingredients also allow the cook to correct or customize the flavor of any dish by tweaking its sweetness, saltiness, or acidity until the cook feels it's just right. Having a set of fundamental ingredients on hand can take a lot of the stress out of cooking because it allows us to apply some of the same cooking principles to many different foods. Pasta. I think whole grain pasta is a terrific choice. I actually happen to like it. Some people can't stand it, but it's gotten a lot better in the last few years, so give it another try if you don't like it. Olive oil is absolutely essential. I always have cans of salmon and tuna. Vinegar is important in many ways. Soy sauce is essential. I marinate a lot of the things that I cook. Lemons do wonderful things for almost everything, and adding a little acid to food just kind of brightens it and just makes it very special. And then I have a few things in the garden. I always have parsley in the garden, which is kind of a magic ingredient too. And cilantro, and in the summer I have basil. In many ways, cooking is empowerment. The person stirring the pot usually ends up having the final say over how much fat, sugar, salt, and total calories end up in the foods we eat. Unlike the processed food industry, we have the long-term health of the consumer in mind when we're preparing our own food. By doing the best we can with the resources that are available to each of us, we can optimize our nutritional health and prevent many of the chronic diseases we as a society are fighting in epidemic proportions. The cooking issue is different for all of us, and we have to kind of take a, make an assessment of where we are with cooking, what's possible, what's not possible, given our lifestyle. But if we share, if we plan, if you keep certain basic things in your pantry and fridge so that even if you haven't had time to stop at the store on the way home or you're out of things, you can still make a good dinner. For examples, our default here very often is we always have some cans of wild salmon in the pantry, we always have dried pasta, there's always olive oil and lemon, and there's always frozen spinach. With those three ingredients, the salmon, the pasta, and the frozen spinach, I can make a terrific dinner in 15, 20 minutes, and it's very inexpensive. And, you know, it's nothing glamorous, but it's very satisfying and everybody in the family enjoys it.