Our editors handpick the products that we feature. We may earn commission from the links on this page.

The pandemic will leave behind a generation of heroes who cook everyday meals with pantry staples.

We all lead what I call a kitchen life. The collective time we spend in the kitchen during our years on earth, preparing and eating food—whether that means pouring a bowl of cereal, scrambling together a Wednesday-night supper, or slow-roasting something huge on a Sunday afternoon—constitutes a life-within-a-life, and everyone’s is different.

And yet, in the last two years, everyone’s kitchen life was changed by the pandemic, also known as the great equalizer.

For me, it started in the summer of 2020, when I had a craving for my late mother’s Armenian rice pilaf, a home-cooking classic she made from pantry staples several times a week. But mine turned out to be nothing like hers—it tasted strange and sort of bad. I began googling other recipes for the same dish. Yes, all the ingredients were there. The method was the same. So where did I go wrong?

Turns out the problem was me: I was cooking out of my own pantry when I should have been cooking out of hers. My mom was a home cook long before the days of specialty and artisanal everything, and by “upgrading” the ingredients, I had downgraded the integrity of her dish. The flavor profile of the recipe required the same ingredients she used: College Inn Chicken Stock, not unsalted free-range; Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice, which is parboiled, instead of organic long-grain; and boxed vermicelli, probably Ronzoni or San Giorgio, but definitely not heritage-grain noodles extruded through bronze dies.

Using those old-school supermarket products created a pilaf exactly like my mom’s, and I was relieved and happy about how familiar it tasted.

It’s weird to think about those early dark days of the pandemic. Where I live, we stood outside smaller-capacity urban markets waiting for our turn to enter, often only to find depleted inventories and workers doing their very best to keep our food chains flowing. After years of being told that an ingredient is good only when it is “local” or “artisanal,” suddenly we were scrambling for industrially canned garbanzos—and felt lucky to get them.

But if I were to make a list of the people and practices that most redefined how we eat during the Covid era, at the very top I’d put hardworking home cooks. With their imagination and resourcefulness, everyday home cooks managed to feed families, friends, and neighbors, all while restaurants closed and grocery supplies became (and remain) unpredictable.

Although I wrote a column about chefs for almost 20 years, I’ve always had special affection for home cooks. I like to look at pretty food pictures as much as anyone, but the celebrity-focused and fetishized aspects of stylized food have never been as interesting to me as the dishes people make each day in their own kitchens.

Every kitchen is a map of its cook’s culinary heritage—the ingredients for family-favorite dishes; the grandmother’s Bundt pan and the memories it holds; and the random weirdness, like the spice drawer with an array unlike anyone else’s, or that extra bottle of clam juice—and this cultural diversity reflects our complex national identity. But dig deeper and you’ll find a personal undercurrent and powerful rituals—as well as a big dose of drudgery—and I would love to see those who deliver everyday meals every day get the respect they deserve in the bigger culinary world. Their practicality and realism brought structure to our kitchens during the most chaotic time. Home cooking, they reminded us, is not a beauty contest but an endurance challenge. Stocking a pantry is nothing new for them—they know how to cobble together a meal out of what’s on hand, and have always embraced frozen, canned, and long-shelf-life foods as natural parts of what makes a kitchen work.

So, another important entry on my personal Covid-era kitchen list would be our liberation from the ingredient “best quest.” Home cooking isn’t just recreational anymore, reserved for weekends and special occasions. Home cooking is our lifeline, our real-world necessity. Making meals happen every day requires being more realistic about sourcing, using what works dish by dish, without judgment. This is a more productive, more plausible, and more modern cooking mindset, particularly now as staffing shortages and continued restaurant restrictions prove that our own kitchens remain our most autonomous food resource. As home cooks we are free to make our own rules, and our collective kitchen lives are better for that independence. 

broken pieces of vermicelli or thin spaghetti

Uncle Ben’s converted rice

(You might have to experiment with timing because everyone’s stove and pot is different. But for the first time, use the 20-minute mark. You want the liquid to be absorbed, but the pilaf should still be lovely and moist.)

Here just a few of the notable finds made by my Covid cooking community that found a permanent place in my kitchen life.

There’s a world of new pantry shortcuts out there, and many are what my kitchen community calls “second-step cooking:” products that let us bypass shopping and most of the prep and get right into the dish itself. Distantly related to historic pantry shortcuts like Hamburger Helper, introduced during the economic crunch of 1971 to stretch a minimum amount of meat into more servings, these new cornerstone products are a modern combination of specialty-food ingenuity and a new standard of commercial production, often with less processing. Many reflect different ethnic and regional cuisines, introducing new flavors without a major investment of time or money tracking.

Vanessa and Kim Pham, first-generation Vietnamese American sisters, created a set of authentic sauce starters for what they call “proud, loud Asian home cooking.” Smartly designed for mail order, the shelf-stable pouches (with all the aromatics, spices, and oils) are laid flat in what functions like an oversized matchbox, sliding to open, dropped into a snug-fitting shipping box without any extra packing material.

Seasoned non-GMO beans made with heart-healthy avocado oil, and seasoned rice cooked in bone broth, represent a world of traditional Creole, Caribbean, and Latin-American flavors—what founder Ibraheem Basir calls “diverse foods with shared origins.” Any of the beans and rice, on their own or in combinations, make easy plate partners, ready in less than 5 minutes, and the refried beans are integral to one of my favorite communal dishes: bubbly 5-ingredient chicken-enchilada casserole from Pinch of Yum.

A gluten-free alternative to breadcrumbs in 8 seasoned flavors: Italian, Original, Everything, Spicy, Barbecue, Ranch, Lemon Pepper. Use for coating chicken (thighs! Wings! Cutlets!), fish (salmon! Shrimp! Halibut), eggplant before cooking (a new kind of Parmesan!), or sprinkle in an extra layer of seasoning flavor and subtle crunchy texture to a finished dish, from salads and soups to pan- or oven-roasted vegetables (Brussels sprouts! Cauliflower! Green beans!).

Published before Covid but destined for our kitchen era, Small Victories is subtitled Recipes, Advice + Hundreds of Ideas for Home-Cooking Triumphs. It delivers. Turshen’s olive-oil fried eggs with lemon yogurt sauce has become a weekly dish for me. The lacy, crunchy underside offset by the thick richness of the yolks—created by adding a drop of water to the hot pan before covering and letting them steam—is a perfect example of what Turshen means by “small victory:” tiny effort for a big result. It turns the eggs into a satisfying main course (particularly paired with beans and rice from a Dozen Cousins). And the accompanying lemon yogurt sauce has so many other uses: drizzled onto roasted eggplant, Shawarma chicken thighs, cumin roasted carrots—there’ll be no stopping you.

Any time you feel weary about putting together yet another meal and need to refresh your cooking focus and spirit, the OG home cook Laurie Colwin is just who you need. Although she died in 1992 at the age of 48, her books of funny but thoughtful essays are more relevant than ever. In Home Cooking she refers to herself as a homebody (by choice) and gives us this lasting wisdom: “When people enter the kitchen, they often drag their childhood in with them,” a knowing way of describing the emotional charge we feel for the food we remember from our past, and the way those dishes influence our kitchen lives today. Buy a used book from an earlier printing if you can: The original cover art is so much better than the newly released versions.

With appealing photography and clear practical instruction, Lindsay Ostrom covers flavor profiles from a world of cuisines. Recipes are categorized, easy for searching by ingredient, method, season, or popularity. Even if you don’t feel like making the exact recipe, photography of the ingredients and steps teach you what goes together, so you can invent the rest on your own. Many of her million-plus Instagram followers—a milestone she reached during Covid—post pictures of the way they adapted core recipes, a testament to the creativity of home cooks.

On weekly rotation in our Covid community dinners was her Moroccan Spiced Chickpea Glow Bowl. We used those chickpeas in many other meals, like baked with feta, topped with fried eggs, or as a side for homemade lamb gyros. It’s one of the flexible pantry staple recipes that saved us.