The Perfect Pantry®

Peanut oil (Recipe: broccoli eggrolls)

Updated August 2010.

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.

Instant coffee (Recipe: outrageous brownies)

I was a Beatle-loving, poetry-writing, hooky-playing, hippie-dippy, sometimes-vegetarian, coffee-guzzling teenager.

My parents drank instant coffee, and when I was growing up, so did I.

At some point in my junior high years, I received one share of Chock Full o'Nuts stock as a gift, so I announced that, as a loyal stockholder, I would ("henceforth," I'm sure I said) drink only Chock Full. They didn't make instant coffee, so my mother went right on buying whatever brand she usually bought, and my principles disintegrated after a day or two of coffee withdrawal.

My parents were easy-going about the coffee thing, and I can't remember an age when I didn't drink it. Black, no cream, no sugar. I was no coffee sissy back then, though I add a bit of skim milk now.

Capers (Recipe: chicken marbella)

Updated June 2010.

 

I love capers — the classy film "To Catch a Thief," the ditzy "How to Steal a Million", the ridiculous "Pink Panther", and anything funny with Robert Redford. 

I'm not quite as in love with the kind of capers you put in your mouth — and yet they are always in The Perfect Pantry, because sometimes a recipe calls for them, and nothing else will do.

Powdered buttermilk (Recipe: apple spice bread)

When most people think of Rhode Island, they think of Newport mansions and the America's Cup.

Jazz festivals.

Clambakes on the beach.

Rhode Island Red chickens. (Okay, not everyone thinks of chickens....)

Until I moved here, I was one of those people. If you'd told me I was moving to apple country — that, in fact, I'd be buying my Macouns at an orchard named Apple Land — I would have said "hah!".

But here I am, smack dab in apple land, where I can buy Jonagolds and Cortlands, Mutsu and Macintosh, from August until March.

The thing about apple land is that it's miles from here to anything like a grocery store. So I always keep powdered buttermilk, an essential ingredient in my favorite apple spice bread and other baked goodies, in my pantry.

What is buttermilk? And what makes it cultured?