The Perfect Pantry®

Recipe for bok choy stir-fry with ginger and garlic

When I'm lucky enough to get to an Asian market (the closest is nearly 20 miles away), I steer my cart right to the produce aisles to stock up on things the grocery store in my village doesn't carry: choy sum, lemongrass, fresh bean sprouts, and my favorite baby bok choy, a miniature Chinese cabbage. You can make this stir-fry with grown-up bok choy, by trimming the head through the root into smaller wedges, but if you can find the babies, you'll love the sweeter flavor and more delicate texture. Choose heads with either white or a pale green stalks; the taste is the same, so buy whichever color coordinates with the rest of your dinner. This recipe utilizes one of my lazy-girl techniques for wok cooking: pan steaming, the same method used to make potstickers. Rather than blanching the bok choy in a separate pot, I stir-fry in the wok, then toss in a small amount of water and slap a lid on to catch the steam. The tender baby bok choy heads cook quickly this way, while absorbing the flavors of the sauce -- and I only have to wash one pan.

Gingerbread waffles recipe

Our grandson loves chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, but I've never been one to go sweet early in the morning. I'd rather have these gingerbread waffles for dessert, but my husband Ted loved them as an afternoon snack, with butter and maple syrup. In other words, don't let me tell you when to eat waffles. Almost every ingredient in these waffles comes right from the pantry. I swapped white whole wheat flour for half of the all-purpose flour in the original recipe, and upped the amount of powdered ginger because I love it. Though somewhat more dense thanks to the whole grain flour, these waffles still have the cake-like quality of gingerbread and, topped with ginger ice cream or vanilla frozen yogurt, would make a great dessert for kids or grown-ups. If you're having a party, cook a batch of waffles ahead, and refrigerate or freeze them; then, to serve, simply pop them in the toaster. One waffle per person will be perfect at the end of the meal. Our grandson might just manage two for breakfast.

Other People's Pantries #182

From Veee, in Austin, Texas:

My pantry is long and narrow so it isn't easy to take pictures but I hope you can get the idea. I have 5 shelves plus the floor along one wall. And one shelf above a clothes rod on the end.

Recipe for cardamom-brown sugar snickerdoodles cookies

What I love about snickerdoodles: even if you're not a baker, and I am not, you always have all of the ingredients you need to bake these cookies right in your pantry. Cream of tartar might not be in constant rotation, but you know you have it somewhere in the rear of your spice rack, and even if it's almost ancient, like mine, it will give these cookies the bit of puff they need. The cardamom in this recipe lends the cookies a grown-up air, but kids will love them, too. We sprinkled ours with a pinch of extra cardamom after they came out of the oven. If you like your cookies sweeter, top the cookies before baking with demerara or another large-crystal sugar.