The Perfect Pantry

Chipotle peppers in adobo (Recipe: chipotle turkey meatballs)

A few evenings ago, the friends who come to eat the food I cook and photograph for this blog -- friends who don't mind meals that are cold, poorly timed, mismatched cuisines, with portions missing out of every dish -- were talking about a cachepot (cash-POH), the decorative pot that holds a flower pot.

Somehow the conversation veered away from trying to convince our friend Bob to make cachepots for an upcoming flower show. Instead, we ended up talking about pronounciation.

That got me thinking about some food words that trip people up.

Words like mascarpone, quinoa, and chipotle.

Poor chipotles. One of my favorite pantry ingredients, chipotle peppers in adobo have such a beautiful name, so often mispronounced.

The Perfect Pantry's foods of love (Recipe: sugar-free chocolate cupcakes)

 

Every January 23, my husband Ted and I celebrate the anniversary of a warehouse fire in Newark, New Jersey.

The fire consumed an entire city block, and firefighters battled all night, pouring water on a building that, in frigid winter weather, morphed into an ice palace. It was horrible and beautiful, and going to watch it in the middle of the night was our first date.

I remember everything about that night, as you do when it is the first date of the rest of your life.

I remember everything, except what we ate.

Given how it turned out, though, I think we must have consumed some of the aphrodisiac ingredients I keep in my pantry.

Other People's Pantries #106

From Rhonda (The Garden Buzz), in Minnesota:

My pantry is great, I know it -- compared to my old house where I used to keep things in a bathroom cabinet -- two side by side spaces with generous pull-out drawers, screened by richly-stained cabinetry.

Brown sugar (Recipe: sweet and spicy tomato jam)

Updated from a 2007 post, with new photos, links, and a new printer-friendly recipe.

We have an elementary school science teacher in the family, so there is no excuse for the ignorance I am about to confess to you.

A few months ago, Ted and I found a jar of hard-as-a-rock brown sugar on the pantry shelves. (This is not the embarrassing part. Well, okay, it is embarrassing, but not from a science point of view.)

How could we get that solid sugar out of the jar? Chip away at it with a knife? Dangerous. Melt it in the microwave? Hot sugar -- very dangerous.

And then I remembered that there was something which, when placed in a jar of hardened sugar, would restore the sugar's moisture and fluffiness.

Eureka! I put a slice of whole wheat bread into the jar, sealed the top, and left it overnight. In the morning, the bread was hard as a rock, but the brown sugar was light and fluffy, completely restored to health.

To me, this was a miracle. How did the moisture pass from the bread to the sugar? Would something else (an apple? a damp paper towel?) do just as well? I can't explain how or why, but I can tell you that the bread really works. (Science teachers and other readers, please help.)

Dijon mustard (Recipe: beef, ale and onion stew)

When I moved into my very own apartment for the first time, back in the 1970s, I didn't know anything about cooking, so I filled my pantry with the things my mother had kept in her pantry.

Unfortunately, she didn't know much about cooking, either.

So it was years before I discovered some ingredients I now couldn't live without, like olive oil, cumin, coconut milk and Dijon mustard.