10 Storecupboard Must Haves

With a few essentials kept to hand in your storecupboard you've always got the basics of a good meal. Here are my favourites:

1. Maldon Sea Salt - I like food to be well seasoned. These lovely sea salt flakes taste saltier so you need less of them to season food well.
2. Oil - I always have Extra Virgin for salad dressing and drizzling and ordinary olive oil and sunflower oil for cooking
3. Dried Herbs - most dried herbs taste like sawdust and you're better leaving them out if you don't have fresh. The exceptions are thyme, oregano and bay leaves.
4. Dried Pasta - My store cupboard always contains spaghetti, tagliatelle, rigatoni and something spirally! I prefer semolina pasta.
5. Rice - Basmati is my favourite rice and I also have arborio rice for making risotto ( an ultimate storecupboard dish ) and pudding rice.
6. Tinned Tomato and Sundried Tomato Puree - Much better to use tinned tomatoes than out of season rock hard fresh ones. The tomato puree adds a real depth and smokiness to dishes
7. Marigold Bouillon Powder - a lot of chefs get sniffy about using stock cubes and powder but this one is generally accepted as the best and acceptable to the food purists.
8. Plain Flour and Baking Powder - flour is an essential for thickenign sauces and obviously for baking
9. Good Quality Vanilla Extract - not essence. Makes a real difference to a cakes and other puddings
10. Spices - I'm never without cinnamon, mixed spice, cumin seeds, cumin sticks, garam marsala, turmeric, ground cumin, cayenne pepper,cloves, mustard seed and ground coriander