10 Easy Pantry Meals From Your Stockpile

Here are super easy and frugal meals to make from groceries that are already in your pantry! Stay in your grocery budget with these simple dinners made from non perishable items in your kitchen.

With all of the natural disasters happening worldwide, it’s more important than ever to make sure you have a stockpile of food – especially of non-perishable items. Along with more items in your pantry, you need easy pantry meals to make!

Ezra Taft Benson, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once said, “There is wisdom in having on hand a year’s supply of food, clothing, and fuel, if possible, and in being prepared to defend our families and our possessions and to take care of ourselves.” (Ezra Taft Benson – Prepare Ye – Ensign, Jan. 1974, 69)

He also said, “The revelation to store food may be as essential to our temporal salvation today as boarding the ark was to the people in the days of Noah.” (God, Family, Country: Our Three Great Loyalties (1975), 402.)

With those warnings in mind, you should begin now to work on your stockpile in your pantry.  Once you have a large stockpile of non-perishable foods, the next question is what to do with it!  Every family has their go-to meals, but most of the time they are made from perishable items (eggs, milk, etc.).

What you really need to do is come up with easy meals you can make from pantry items. It’s really not that difficult to come up with an effective food storage system.

If you’re looking for the best ways to plan financially for any potential emergencies, this post here will help.

Ingredients for Easy Pantry Meals

Here are the different non-perishable items that we like to have on hand and will use in these recipes. Each of these has multiple uses in our easy pantry meals.

• spaghetti noodles
• bite-size pasta noodles (shells, elbow macaroni, etc.)
• top ramen
• canned corn, green beans, and other vegetables
• chili beans or canned chili
• canned seasoned beans
• canned stew
• jars of pasta sauce
• canned clam chowder (or similar soup in a white sauce)
• cream of mushroom/chicken soup
• rice
• boxed mashed potatoes
• canned chicken
• canned tuna
• saltines or other crackers

In order to know how much you should get to make up a year’s supply of food for your family, find 7 meals (one for each night of the week) that your family might eat for dinner.  Count out how much of each ingredient you would need for your family for each meal, then multiply that amount by 52 weeks.  Bingo – a year’s supply of dinners! These are easy pantry meals you can put together quickly.

Then add in some cereal and oatmeal for breakfasts, and you’re good to go.  In a true emergency situation, you would mostly likely either skip lunches or use leftovers from the day before.

Recipes for Easy Pantry Meals

Here are some of our favorite ways to mix and match the above items to make delicious easy pantry meals!  The amounts we state are estimates based on what would feed our family of four, as well as our style of cooking (lighter on the sauce, etc.).  We purposely kept them generic so you can experiment a bit to find out what works best for your family.  Bon apetite!

*Note: as part of our stockpile, we regularly purchase discounted meat and cheese, and we then freeze it in a deep freezer.  If you have a generator or your electricity has come back on, you can incorporate it into these meals!

1) Silly Chili Macaroni

Check out our post on one of the most delicious pantry meals we’ve ever had – silly chili macaroni!

2) Easy Chicken Noodle Soup

Cook up a few packs of ramen noodles.  Add in canned chicken, as well as some canned vegetables (like peas, carrots, and corn) for an easy chicken noodle soup.  Sometimes we do canned tuna instead of chicken to have a bit of variety.

3-4) Stew & Rice/Potatoes

Make boxed mashed potatoes or a pot of rice.  Top with heated canned stew. This is a really easy pantry meal!

5) Rice & Beans

Make a pot of rice and stir in flavored beans.  (We like to use seasoned black beans.)  If you have any frozen ham or steak, it makes a great mix-in!

6) Simple Spaghetti

Cook spaghetti noodles and add in a jar of pasta sauce.  If you have frozen hamburger or hot dogs, then add those in as well! 

One fun idea for hot dogs (especially if you have kids) is to thread the uncooked spaghetti noodles through hot dog slices and cook them together!  We also try to get a large variety of flavored pasta sauces (meat, four cheese, etc.) when we stock up so that we feel like there is some variety.

Want to make spaghetti even easier?  Learn how to make it in an Instant Pot!

7) Tuna Casserole

This recipe for tuna casserole was handed down from Tiffany’s grandma (the same one who taught her how to make canned apple pie filling) and has even been fed to a general authority when Tiffany was a missionary.

Even better, tuna casserole can be a make-ahead freezer meal!

8) Tuna & Crackers

This is an easy one!  Just open canned tuna, mix it with canned peas, and place it on saltines or other crackers (we prefer Triscuits).  If you have mayonnaise, we mix it into the tuna as well to make a small tuna salad.

9) Chowder & Crackers

Warm up clam chowder (or whichever soup you stocked up on).  Crumble saltines into the soup, or use the crackers as a spoon to scoop up the soup.

10) Shepherd’s Pie

Cook up boxed mashed potatoes.  Mix in warmed cans of vegetables like corn and green beans, as well as a can of cream of mushroom soup.  If you can, add in hamburger and top with grated cheese.  Cook in the oven in a casserole dish (if possible).

Other Easy Pantry Meal Ideas

Do you have any other easy pantry meal ideas from non-perishable items that your family just loves?  Please leave them in the comments below!

An earlier version this post was written by Tiffany on The Crazy Shopping Cart

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