Name: How To Stock a Pantry | Hilah Cooking
Uploaded: 2025-07-30T17:59:08.000Z
Duration: 7 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey dudes, I'm Hilah and today on Hilah Cooking we're talking about how to stock a pantry.

This is a request I've gotten often and it's a video that I'm excited about making because we did just move to a new house and I had to start all over just a few months ago.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

So I was able to get a really clear picture of the essential things that I think are useful in any kitchen.

So I'm going to start first by talking about some seasonings that I keep on hand all the time.

I typically will keep an olive oil and a coconut oil on hand and then olive oil I can use for salad dressings or sauteing and same thing with the coconut oil.

Of course, it adds a coconut flavor but I like that and I also use it to make popcorn.

And then in the fridge, I'll keep butter.

So between those three fats, I guess, I'm able to cook just about anything.

Then always have some acidifiers, obviously vinegar.

If you're making like a stew or a chili or something and it's missing something, a lot of times a little bit of acid like even just like a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar or balsamic vinegar even sometimes in a pot of stew or chili just kind of perks everything up and does a little bit of a magic trick.

And then the white wine vinegar is also one that I find really versatile for salad dressings especially and then just like drizzling on top of steamed greens or steamed broccoli or something like that.

I try to always have lemons and limes on hand for adding to vegetables, salads, even squeezing on top of like grilled meat or seafood just to brighten everything up.

Use a little bit of lemon zest in vegetable dishes.

I mean you can never go wrong with like a little squeeze of lemon or lime on something, right?

If you want to add a little bit of like umami flavor to like a vegetarian dish, add some soy sauce instead of salt and it just adds a deeper, richer kind of almost a meaty flavor and people will be like, oh, what did you put in this?

And you're like soy sauce and they're like this isn't even Asian and you're like I'm a genius.

Dry spices I think are going to vary a lot depending on what you like to cook.

Personally, I do cook a lot of Mexican and Tex-Mex food and a lot of what I would just consider like American food.

So the ones that I keep on hand that I use a lot of are oregano.

I use this in Mexican food and Greek like add a little bit to a salad dressing or something.

Chili powder, of course, for tacos or chili or any kind of meat.

I love adding turmeric to scrambled eggs in the morning.

I think it adds like a really nice earthy flavor to things and also it's really good for your prostate.

Well, I'm thinking not of my prostate but my husband's.

Again, Mexican, Tex-Mex, Indian food all use a lot of cumin.

I love adding bay leaves to rice when I'm cooking just plain rice or like spaghetti sauce or stew or any kind of braised meat.

Just throw a bay leaf or two in there, break them in half, delicious like floral kind of aroma that it adds.

Obviously, you do not need a salt grinder but I actually find it's really helpful because you can have like different sizes if you want coarse salt as a finishing salt or if you want fine salt because you're baking something and also it's a matching set.

But freshly ground black pepper, I do think that makes a big difference.

I think a lot of times when you buy pre-ground pepper, it loses a lot of the nuance that freshly ground pepper has so I think it is worth the investment of a real nice pepper grinder.

Finally, as far as dry spices, oh my God, I would be totally cheating if I didn't admit that I keep this on hand at all times.

My dad always used Lori's seasoning salt.

It's just really good when you are tired and your brain doesn't even have enough energy to think about what you want to season your food with.

You just dump a bunch of that shit on it and it's fine which brings me to the pantry items that I keep on hand all the time to facilitate making dinner when I just really don't give a fuck about making dinner but I still have to do it because that's my life as a woman.

I like little pasta shapes and I like skinny spaghetti and like angel hair and stuff because they cook fast and I can do like one pot pasta and I feel like the one pot pasta thing that's like all the rage right now really works best if you use a small shape rather than a long shape that you break in half and then what's the point anyway?

Tomatoes for making sauce or chili or stew or whatever.

I still am totally freaked out by canned food so I try to buy everything in cartons when it's possible.

These are quite a bit more expensive than canned tomatoes but I think it's worth it because I don't trust the plastics company that put BPA and BPS in everything that we eat.

They're a vegetarian protein source obviously but they're a great legume because you don't have to soak them.

The little red split lentils cook even faster like you could cook a pot of lentils in like 20 or 30 minutes and have some lentil soup on the stove and it's warm and comforting and put a little bit of soy sauce in it, finish it with a little lemon zest and people will be actually pretty impressed.

I know I try to eat brown rice when I can but I always keep white rice on hand because it cooks so much faster.

I try to keep some quinoa on hand just because it cooks really fast.

It's really nutritious and you can just stir fry some vegetables with anything like some egg or leftover meat or something or just vegetables and put it over some rice and it's a really, really fast meal.

When in doubt, wrap it in a tortilla and you can put anything in a tortilla and people are like, oh wow, it's tacos and you're like, it's actually just some gross stuff that I put in a tortilla.

You can make a quesadilla to sort of make a side dish even if you're just having some kind of lame dinner but then you like serve it with quesadillas and it suddenly seems a little bit more fancy.

A lot of times I'll put like cooked sweet potato or spinach or something inside them to make them a little bit healthier, whatever, it's like I try.

Almost forgot about these three gems, garlic and onion, wait, what the hell, ginger and onion and garlic.

I never ever buy jarred minced garlic because I kind of hate how it smells when I open it and smell it and also fresh garlic lasts forever.

I mean there's no reason that you shouldn't use this except time.

I'll give you that much but it's not that much time involved.

I mean let's be real, just practice a bunch and you'll get really fast at it.

These are so versatile and ginger doesn't last quite as long as garlic but it'll still last a week or two so you can add it to stir-fries, you can add it to Indian food, you can add it to smoothies.

Add a little chunk to your morning smoothie for a tropical twist.

In the fridge I would always keep also butter, eggs, at least one kind of cheese and then in the freezer I usually have like a bag of, at least like a bag of broccoli florets just so when all else fails I'm like, oh my God, at least we have some vegetables.

Leave a comment if you have any suggestions, things that you love to keep on hand, what you do with it and then also of course this book is written for people who are just moving out of their house and saying, I have no idea how to stock a pantry.

So I'll put a link to that below and I hope you enjoy this video.

Thanks to everyone who requested it for getting me off my ass to actually finally do it and yeah, leave me a comment, tell me what you keep in your pantry.

Don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you next time.