The Perfect Pantry

Lentils (Recipe: one-of-everything lentil soup)

I missed the 18th Annual National Lentil Festival in Pullman, Washington, last week.

I missed out on a lot of good stuff.

The Lentil Pancake Breakfast. The Legendary Lentil Cookoff. The crowning of the Little Lentil King and Queen. And the Tour de Lentil 100K Bike Ride through the Palouse region of eastern Washington and Idaho, where more than one-third of this country's lentils are grown.

Szechuan peppercorns (Recipe: salt and pepper prawns)

File this under "explorations in an ethnic market where you don't speak the language and can't read the package labels and you've wandered up and down the aisles and looked and looked and know what you want is somewhere in the store but you cannot find it."

So you ask everyone in the market, which by the way is in Boston's Chinatown, "Do you have szechuan peppercorns?" Blank stares. You try different pronounciations — sesh-wan, setch-wan, setch-u-on. Pep-per-corn. Pep-pah (the Boston dialect).

Nobody speaks English.

Nobody understands your pantomime.

Fair enough. After all, you are the only one there who doesn't speak the language.

Frustrated but determined, you ask your husband Ted to bring his Chinese friend Margaret to the market to search for these peppercorns. A few days later on their lunch break, they go — but they come home empty-handed, too. Which, frankly, makes you feel a teensy bit better.

This is a true story, by the way. It happened in 1998.

Pomegranate molasses (Recipe: pomegranate fish)

My husband Ted laughs whenever I come home from the store with a bottle of wine. I'm not much of a drinker, so I shop for wine by the label — not the brand, but the actual label. I can't resist pretty pictures, great graphics, good colors, and clever names like Goats Do Roam.

I shop in ethnic markets the same way. Every now and then I'll have a particular recipe in mind, but more often I wander through the store, filling my basket with things that look interesting. That's how I discovered pomegranate molasses several years ago, in the Syrian Grocery in my old neighborhood in Boston. (Isn't the label beautiful?)

Cloves (Recipe: Grandma's applesauce)

Liz Claiborne, Hugo Boss, Pierre Cardin and Perry Ellis all make men's colognes with a hint of cloves.

What do they know that I don't know?

When I think of cloves, I don't think of men. I don't think of breath fresheners, antiseptics, aphrodisiacs, or cures for toothaches, either, though all are traditional uses for cloves.

Instead, I conjure up the aromas of applesauce, pumpkin pie, and the screaming-hot lamb vindaloo at the Jackson Diner in New York City.

Peanut oil (Recipe: broccoli eggrolls)

Utopian idealist and German inventor Rudolf Diesel had a dream. When he demonstrated his new engine at the 1900 Paris World Exposition, it ran not on petroleum, but on peanut oil.   

In the perfect world, Diesel believed, renewable biofuels like peanut oil could power farm machinery and automobiles.

More than 100 years later, my car still guzzles gasoline, but peanut oil powers my stir-fry cooking, earning it shelf space in The Perfect Pantry.