Nangle Natters: Kitchen supplies

When I first moved out on my own, I determined that I wanted to have a kitchen like my mother’s. It wasn’t that it was big – in fact it was downright tiny – but that everything that I might need, should I want to follow a recipe, would already be there.

Student halls inevitably disappointed, despite my approach of buying random ingredients in the hope that I’d end up with a store of staples. I had a tub of ready-made breadcrumbs and three tins of ‘stuff’, bought in a whirlwind of hope and ambition. I accidentally stockpiled milk and butter and random kinds of flour, with the knowledge that my mother always had these things in the house. I didn’t really think too much about how much they might be used. And by the end of term the weevils had claimed them.

I had a tub of ready-made breadcrumbs and three tins of ‘stuff’

Now I live in my own flat and have my own tiny kitchen, and I finally have the staples. It would seem that this kind of a kitchen storing only grows organically. I didn’t want to leave the house to go to the shops the other night and so found an old tin of soup for my supper. I just knew that there would be one there, right at the back of the cupboard, by the law of a permanent kitchen.

Whilst having a rummage I even surprised myself by finding a bar of Kendal mint cake right at the back too. Clearly all of my rhetoric about zombie apocalypse supplies registered somewhere in my supermarket-brain, for that to have arrived and found a space.

So finally, I have stores. I have flour – that I use, I have sugar, tins of soup, even a selection of herbs and spices, emergency orange squash, and various Oxo cubes. Only a home’s kitchen is supplied so well, it seems. There’s no place like home.