5 Dinner Ingredients You Shouldn’t Live Without

It sucks when it’s 8 p.m. and you have no clue what you’re having for dinner. No one’s going to make it for you, and you’re on the verge of going to the drive-thru or ordering take-out again.

Save the money and the calories by stocking these five magical ingredients. With them, you can whip up a quick and delicious dinner any night of the week.

1. Cooking wine. Though not really the kind of thing you want to drink straight-up, cooking wine is great for making amazing sauces, putting in some casseroles, or adding major flavor to meat dishes.

As with regular wine, white tends to go better with chicken and red with beef. If you like to drink wine, there’s also something to be said about keeping your cellar stocked with good drinking wines that can double as cooking wines.

2. Chicken broth. Every bit as useful as cooking wine, but for slightly different things. Chicken broth can help make a wonderful pasta sauce, is a fantastic base for soups with a lot of flavor, and will make rice and noodles taste a lot better (if you boil them in the broth instead of water).

3. Pasta. If you have pasta of almost any kind in your kitchen, you’re good to go. Unless there’s absolutely nothing in your fridge besides cans of beer, you should be able to come up with something to put on top of it that will taste OK. Pasta’s very forgiving and versatile, and sometimes I use it three or four nights a week.

4. Canned, diced tomatoes. Talk about a lifesaver. You can use these babies for spaghetti sauce, soups, casseroles, curries, vegetable-based dishes…the possibilities are pretty close to endless. My personal favorite thing about them? No chopping.

5. Cheese. I like to keep a block of cheddar around at all times, because I find that most of the things I regularly make (burritos, macaroni casseroles, meatballs, creamy pastas) take to cheddar pretty well. Asiago and parmigiano-reggiano or romano also work like a charm, though.

So, there they are…the five dinner biggies. Using these, my favorites to make include a long-noodle pasta (like linguini) with a chicken and white wine sauce and a beef macaroni casserole with tomatoes and cheddar.

Anybody else have great dinners they make using these items?