Everybody has food or something you will alway find in their fridges or cupboards. Their basics. I can tell you right now, that my mother always has fresh coffee, oatcakes, mint tea, HP sauce and salt and pepper in her house. Pretty much that’s all you can guarantee. Most of the time, you’ll also find tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, chicken, hummus, tinned mackrel and horseradish but these things are not guaranteed and never on a Friday!

I’m the same, there’s stuff I always have in the house, pretty much from when I left home; salt, pepper, coffee, olive oil, tomato ketchup and balsamic vinegar.

Then there’s the stuff that, right now, I can’t imagine not having in the house but may change, last year that was granola and lentils, this year the lentils remain but I don’t want granola and there isn’t any in the house. In September, I flirted with porridge, now it’s not a required food. I’ll probably go back to it at some point but right now it’s not making my heart sing, I’m having green smoothies for breakfast!

So this is the stuff that has been at the top of my shopping list for the last month or so.

1) Greek yogurt

A year ago if you had told me that I would be eating nearly a kg of greek yogurt a week, I would have laughed in your face. Cheese aside, I didn’t consume a lot of dairy based food and although I didn’t avoid yogurt, it wasn’t my go-to food. Ma reckons that my poor calcium deprived body has had enough and started to give me cravings. She may be right, last year I started to eat yogurt in my soup and then moved on to Greek yogurt because it has more protein and now I can’t do without it. I stir it into chilli and soups. Eat it with compote and fruit and put it in smoothies. My fridge without it seems impossible to imagine!

2) Beans

I blame this on the two vegetarian days a week. There is only so much cheese you can eat at dinner time! As soon as I started looking at vegetarian recipes, it became apparent that I was going to have to eat more beans. Chickpeas for hummus and this spinach chickpea thing. All sorts of beans for beer bean stew and for work lunches,  not to mention pancetta bean soup and lamb shanks. I cook big batches of them and freeze them so all they need is defrosting!

3) Eggs

I love eggs, I mostly used to have them for cakes, now eat at least 6 a week, in lunches, on top of things, poached eggs on toast is my favourite breakfast..

4) Applesauce

I make a batch of applesauce every week to go in my smoothies. As smoothies are my current favourite breakfast I can’t do without it.

What food can’t you live without at the moment? Is it a new thing or do you always have it in the fridge/cupboard?