The Perfect Pantry®

Dumpling wrappers (Recipe: vegetable dumplings)

'Tis the season of gift-giving, and for a few days last week my huge dining table vanished under sheets of tissue and ribbons and rolls of wrapping paper, waiting to turn books and toys into adventures and surprises.

In the kitchen, too, even the humblest ingredients take on elegance and mystery when they're wrapped.

Store-bought fresh dumpling wrappers, a staple in my pantry, make it easy to add drama to everyday cooking.

Fenugreek (Recipe: saag paneer)

I love spring cleaning.

In my house, spring cleaning gets underway not in April or May, but when there's a snowstorm, the kind that strands me at the end of our uphill driveway while I wait for extrication by the plow guy. This winter, we've seen only a few random snowflakes, but a recent heavy rain triggered the urge to get the cleanout started.

My favorite thing about spring cleaning is that I find stuff. Hidden stuff. Long-lost stuff. Forgotten stuff. Last week, I found:

• The Food of India, a lovely cookbook that still bears its Costco sale sticker (I lose all self-control in the under-$10 cookbook aisle). It was on the bottom of a pile of books on the floor next to my bed, along with Bill Buford's Heat, some books about art, and a trashy legal thriller or two.

• A jar of fenugreek seeds, misplaced three layers deep in the back of the spice rack behind the cinnamon and nutmeg.

Though fenugreek is popular in the cuisines of Ethiopia and Egypt, Turkey, Armenia and Yemen, it's curry — and curiosity — that brought fenugreek to my pantry. Indian cooking is not my forte; I'm much more comfortable poking around in the cuisines of other parts of Asia. So I'm learning, and starting to stock my Indian pantry.

Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (Recipe: risotto with grapefruit)

Just when we've all gotten our heads around the notion of eating locally, I'm here to tell you not to do it.

Not when it comes to cheese.

Not unless you live in Italy, in the small towns around Modena, Parma, Reggio-Emilia, and parts of Bologna and Mantova — the only part of the world where authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese is produced by the 482 members of the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano Reggiano.

Bittersweet chocolate (Recipe: truffles)

Remember the old days, when take-out coffee came in small, medium and large ... and chocolate came in Hershey bars, Toll House chips, and unsweetened Baker's that you were never, ever supposed to eat but was only for baking?

Bye bye, old days.

High-quality chocolate is everywhere. The small market in my rural Rhode Island village — not exactly a hotbed of nouveau anything — now displays bars of organic bittersweet chocolate next to the cash register, right there with the tabloids, horoscope booklets, beef jerky and breath mints.

Hello, infinite possibilities.