If you’re fully stocked with the basics, you can have a delicious dinner in no time, here are the store-cupboard essentials for Greek Cypriot cooking

There’s nothing worse than planning to cook a meal, only to realise there’s nothing in your fridge – it’s a surefire way to make sure you blow your food budget on a takeaway instead.

However, this isn’t a problem for food writer Georgina Hayden, who’s a whizz at creating delicious recipes from store-cupboard ingredients, drawing inspiration from her Greek Cypriot roots. While she still loves vegetables and herbs, store-cupboard essentials mean you don’t always have to have fresh produce on hand – and risk it going off before you get to it.

In fact, Hayden says her latest cookbook ‘Nistisima’ is “mostly store-cupboard ingredients” – predominantly things you can get in your local supermarket, but also “a few specialist things, like syrups and molasses”.

If you want to make sure you’ve got a well-stocked pantry, these are the essentials Hayden suggests everyone should have – particularly if you want to whip up a Greek Cypriot dinner…

Lentils

“Lentils are a bit misunderstood. Lentils are great – you don’t need to pre soak them, and they actually cook quite quickly,” Hayden enthuses.

“I always have brown and green lentils in my cupboard – I have red as well, but that’s more for Asian food. In terms of Greek Cypriot, Greek and Middle Eastern food – green and brown lentils.”

One of her favourite recipes from her new cookbook is a Lebanese dish called rishta. “It’s green lentils cooked with cumin, coriander, and crushed up tagliatelle,” she explains. “It’s super creamy. It says to use fresh tagliatelle, but that’s obviously quite hard to get hold of if you’re not having eggs [the recipes in Nistisima are all vegan], but you can use dried tagliatelle and just crush it up.

“It’s a one-pot dish, and it’s so delicious. And that is proper store cupboard stuff.”

Chickpeas

“I always have jars of chickpeas,” says Hayden – who goes for jars instead of the dried version, which “need to be presoaked, and they take a long time to cook – I just cannot be bothered, I don’t have the time.

“Jarred ones are much more delicious than tinned ones – just the way they’re preserved and cooked, they’re often more tender. The liquid they’re preserved in is what makes hummus go really moussey.”

While you can splash out on expensive jarred chickpeas, Hayden is perfectly happy with the ones you can get for 69p, saying: “I think they’re wicked.”

Rice

Hayden admits this one might sound “really boring”, but she can’t live without rice.

“Rice is such a great staple – you can genuinely have a meal on the table in no time if you’ve always got a bag of rice in your cupboard.”

Some of the rice dishes in Hayden’s new book include spanakorizo – a classic Lenten Greek dish of spinach, tomato and lemon rice, and dolmades – stuffed vine leaves.

Follow us on Instagram