Cooking Through a House Move: Two Weeks of Meals From a Half-Packed Kitchen

The fortnight around a house move is when most households eat worst. It is also, unhelpfully, the fortnight when everyone involved is doing the most physical work and needs feeding properly. Takeaway every night is expensive and makes you feel terrible by day four.

This is a plan that gets you through it using one pan, a chopping board, and whatever survived the pantry cull.

The principle: cook down, not up

Two weeks out, stop treating your kitchen as a place where you acquire ingredients and start treating it as a place you are emptying.

Every meal from this point should reduce the amount of food in the house. No shopping trips beyond fresh basics — milk, eggs, bread, one bag of onions. Everything else comes from what you already own.

You will be surprised how long this lasts. Most households have between ten days and three weeks of food in the cupboards at any time, and almost nobody realises it.

Week one: the freezer

Start with the freezer, because it is the thing you cannot transport.

A domestic freezer holds temperature for roughly four hours once unplugged, and a move takes longer than that. Anything still in there on moving day is either being eaten, given away, or thrown out.

Days 1–3: the identifiable things. Whatever is labelled and recognisable. Portions of things you froze with good intentions. Eat them in order of freezer burn.

Days 4–5: the mystery containers. Everyone has these. Defrost, identify, incorporate. Most mystery containers turn out to be either bolognese or soup, and both go into pasta.

Days 6–7: the raw ingredients. Chicken thighs, mince, prawns, whatever bags of frozen vegetables have accumulated. This is when you cook properly, because it is the last week you will have a functioning kitchen.

The one-pan template

From week two onwards you are working with reduced equipment. Here is the shape that carries you through:

Fat, aromatics, protein, bulk, liquid, seasoning.

Oil or butter. Onion and garlic, or just onion. Whatever protein you have. Whatever carbohydrate you have — rice, pasta, potatoes, lentils, couscous. Enough stock or water to cook it. Salt, pepper, and one dominant flavour.

That template produces a functionally infinite number of meals and requires exactly one pan. Change the dominant flavour and it becomes a different dish: smoked paprika and it is Spanish, cumin and coriander and it is North African, soy and ginger and it is something else entirely. Three specific meals for the last week

Everything rice. Onion, any protein, any vegetable that is going soft, rice, double the water, lid on, twenty minutes. Stir through anything green at the end. Feeds four from almost nothing.

Pantry pasta. Tin of tomatoes, tin of beans or a handful of lentils, whatever dried pasta remains, olive oil, and — this is the part that makes it work — far more black pepper than feels reasonable. If there is a hard cheese end in the fridge, grate it in.

Fry-up for dinner. Eggs, whatever is in the bottom of the fridge, bread. Nobody has ever complained about eggs for dinner on moving week and anyone who does can cook.

Moving day itself

Feed people properly. This is not the day to economise.

Breakfast: something substantial before anyone lifts anything. Eggs and toast, porridge, whatever your Box A can produce.

Midday: sandwiches made in advance, wrapped, in a bag that does not go in the van. People will not stop to make food and will get irritable if there is nothing to grab.

Evening: this is the meal you order in, and you order it early, before you think you are hungry, because delivery times on a Saturday evening are not your friend and everyone hits the wall simultaneously around seven. The equipment question

If you are downsizing — and in London the direction of travel is usually downwards — the kitchen is where the decision gets painful. A serious home cook accumulates equipment that is genuinely good and genuinely bulky. The stand mixer, the stockpot, the preserving pan, the roasting tins that only come out at Christmas.

The honest test is frequency against replacement cost. Something used twice a year that costs £150 to replace is worth keeping even if it cannot live in the new kitchen. Most moving and storage companies will take the overflow on the same visit as the move itself, which is considerably less faff than a separate trip, and it means the decision about the preserving pan does not have to be made at eight in the morning with a van waiting.

What genuinely should go: duplicate utensils, anything with a broken part you have not replaced in a year, and single-purpose gadgets. The avocado slicer is not coming with you.

First week in the new kitchen

Do not unpack everything. Unpack Box A, then add things as you reach for them and find they are missing.

After two weeks, whatever is still in boxes is your honest answer about what you actually cook with. That is more useful information than any amount of decluttering advice, and it costs nothing to collect.