Building a pantry from scratch and clinging to the warmth of a worn-in kitchen

By Claudia Weaver | September 2026 | 4 min read

It was a weekday afternoon and we lived together in a condo on the water. I got my habit of needing to have a hard copy of recipes, articles, and personal writings from my mom. There’s just something about the aesthetic of sticking a recipe on the fridge and hoarding all of my favorite essays in paper form.

When my mom said, “I read a New York Times article that said….”, I knew her insider info would be invaluable. She had printed one of the many NYT has written about keeping a well-stocked pantry.

That was the first time it dawned on me to keep my pantry stocked well enough for cooking at any time of the week. It was a different epiphany than having groceries. I mean, it was the tip of the iceberg of maintaining my kitchen essentials.

Mom and I have frequently shared a kitchen and cooked meals together throughout my life. Diets were attempted, some succeeded and some failed. A favorite pastime of ours is learning varying cuisines and trying our best to cook a meal from it. She’s really great at cooking fish, Lo Mein, and Italian amongst other things. I’m good at piecing together whatever is left in the fridge, and I enjoy baking.

I was the only child at home from age 12 on, and Mom and I lived together again when I was an adult. The first meal I ever cooked was a pasta bake and, unbelievably so, it was horrid. My understanding of cooking began to pick up pace but not very much. You could tell by my favorite foods at the time: my mom’s lasagna and a cheeseburger from Burger King.

A couple years later, when I was in middle school, my mom took me to a farmer’s market in Atlanta, Georgia. It was a massive international market inside a warehouse. Flags of various countries lined the walls and the smell of fresh bread greeted me at the door. I can still remember the sound of the bustling shopping carts and the feeling of being lost in the floor to ceiling aisles. Mom took me to my first butcher counter that day. She grilled the fresh ribeye on our screened-in porch that evening while we listened to the rain, and the porch was dimly lit by candles and retro light fixtures. I don’t think I’ve had a ribeye as buttery as that one since. I’ve been trying to get back to this market for the last ten years.

One of the many ribeyes Mom and I shared over the years.

Over time, we started to realize there were quite a few things in our pantry that needed to always be there. It seems redundant, like an ongoing grocery list, and it sort of is, but The Staples List was a new kitchen rule we put in place and the same idea, yet evolved, has returned to me in my own home.

In action, the rule would look something like this: if you’re the last one to use rice, flour, sugar, any spice, canned goods, or any other item that is used frequently or that can build the foundation of a meal then you’re responsible for writing it on the fridge list. That way our kitchen is always stocked with the necessities.

The Staples List differs from the running grocery list because you usually don’t run out of your staples weekly. Grocery lists are daily or weekly in our house , and staples are biweekly or monthly.

Staples change just as tastebuds and preferences do. Anything you feel is the backbone of your kitchen deserves to be on the list. I don’t count snacks or drinks unless they’re multipurpose. Now that I think about it, the staples aren’t always the things you use frequently because I wouldn’t put coffee on the staples list. That goes on my regular grocery list. The staples are the ingredients that you can count on when you’re cooking your favorite meal, spontaneously baking a dessert for a loved one, or trying a cuisine that’s not in your weekly rotation. Although, I wouldn’t buy items in a cuisine you never eat.

Kitchen staples are what give you strong binders and reliable substitutions. These are the items that you might buy in bulk and, if you don’t have it in your pantry, you can really feel the toll its absence takes on your spontaneous cooking.

If it holds a medicinal and/or nutritional purpose, I will consider the snack a staple. To me, dates and figs are for snacking, baking, and healing—the perfect example of an essential.

My staples list is long, winding, and fluid. My family’s habits change with the seasons, it seems, and so do our eating habits. At Ramadan, we know we need fasting staples. During Winter, we need aromatic and warm spiced baked goods that we don’t eat the rest of the year. In the spring and summer, extra salads, treats for the kids and cooling refreshments.

The essentials of my kitchen have changed with both the weather seasons and the seasons of my womanhood. Items would come and gone alongside the chapters of my life: daughter, student, wife, mother.

I’ve made my own relationship with the kitchen now, as an adult and mom in my thirties but the concept of the Staples List remains, and nearly all of my routines in the kitchen remind me of my mother. She has taught me survival tactics and appreciation of all types of cuisine. She instilled in me a love of food culture. A love that has carried me into my marriage and continues to be a building block of my home.

The kitchen I have now is distinctly mine and my pantry looks a little different as I hope it is ever evolving. It’s currently fall and, while there are seasonal staples that I need to pick up on my next grocery run, I think I’ll start with the building blocks—the ones that can be found in my kitchen during any season, Zute Pantry: The Staples List Issue No. 1 (coming soon).

A few old cookbooks, a crappy toaster, and the essential Moroccan sugar.