Your grandmother surely had one; your mother probably did, too. But as a contemporary cook in a contemporary home, you may not have one at all. A pantry—that is, a "room or closet, usually near a kitchen, in which food, silverware, dishes, etc. are kept," as Webster's puts it.

That's a shame. Keeping a pantry is an honorable custom. Your grandmother's pantry was likely filled with jars of fruits and vegetables, maybe even some she put up herself. Your mother's may have reflected a cooking style popular in her era, perhaps featuring a coterie of canned soups and a jillion boxes of Jell-O.

Your own pantry needn't be so plebeian. Stocking it with those old standbys guarantees your menus will be dated and tired. If you stock it as we suggest, however, you'll almost always be able to cook at least one of your favorite Cooking Light recipes. And if you're savvy, you'll figure out what you need to keep on hand so you're ready in a whipstitch to get something good on the table—in fair weather and foul, without stopping at the store on the way home from work.

Because we like to build flavor from the very first step, the Cooking Light pantry relies on some specialty ingredients your mom might consider exotic. She may not have even been able to buy extra-virgin olive oil when she began to feed her family; now, though, even the remotest market usually offers at least one variety.

Our ingredient lists are long, but fear not. You don't need to fill it up all in one fell swoop. There's an art to building a working pantry. Why not print out these shopping lists and recipes and get started today?