Mark Bittman—writer of The New York Times’ cook­ing Col­umn, The Min­i­mal­ist, and food blog­ger at Bit­ten—has com­piled a list of lack­lus­tre pantry items and their antipodes: the ‘essen­tial’ pro­vi­sions we should stock in their stead.

These things take up more space than they’re worth, while oth­ers are so much bet­ter in their real forms that the dif­fer­ence is laugh­able. Sadly, some remain in com­mon usage even among good cooks. My point here is not to crim­i­nal­ize their use, but to point out how eas­ily and suc­cess­fully we can sub­sti­tute for them, in every case with bet­ter results.

via Life­hacker