The Perfect Pantry®

Linguine, spaghetti (Recipe: linguine with tomato-olive sauce)

Nothing says "pantry" like dried pasta, and the shelves of The Perfect Pantry hold every imaginable shape and size. Welcome to Italian Pasta Week, Day One, Long and Stringy.

One noodle, two noodles, red noodles, blue noodles.

Red sun-dried tomato ravioli. Blue curacao linguine from Giacomo Rizzo, our favorite pasta shop in Venice. Pasta shaped like sombreros, ear lobes, wagon wheels, stars, and corkscrews.

Dittalini. Cappellini. Rotini. Fettucine.

Roll the names around on your tongue, and you can almost taste the pasta.

A Bookworm recommends

This week's Bookworm in the Pantry, Fran, has travelled all around the world, but her home base is one town away in rural northwest Rhode Island. She loves to cook, and loves to read — and since retiring last year from the Rhode Island School of Design, she has a bit more time for both.

UPDATE. Fran recommended:

• Back Story (and the entire Spenser series)
• Blessed are the Cheesemakers
• Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen
• The Gastronomical Me
• The Measure of Her Powers: An MFK Fisher Reader
  

Browse through the eclectic library of previous Bookworm recommendations here.

We'll have a new Bookworm every Saturday, at least through early June.

Want to be a Bookworm in the Pantry? Start here.

 

Curry pastes (Recipe: green chicken curry with eggplant)

The perfect Perfect Pantry would be as large as an airplane hangar, as beautiful as the food halls at Harrod's, and as well-stocked as my favorite book store.

It would have an aisle for chocolate, a wing for noodles, an enormous spice rack five feet tall, and a freezer filled with enough sugar-free ice pops (my shameful addiction) to last for months.

And, it would have an entire section just for Asian condiments — especially curry paste.

Bulgur wheat (Recipe: bulgur with cheese and eggplant)

You're looking at the photo. I know what you're thinking.

Oh, no, here comes the tabbouleh.

If you're a cook of a certain age, you discovered tabbouleh in the Sixties, when "cream" was a rock band and a "big hunk" was a candy bar.

It would have been easy enough to write about tabbouleh, the best-use-of-parsley-as-a-vegetable staple of Middle Eastern cooking, because I first added bulgur to my pantry years ago precisely so I could prepare it for a summer buffet. But then I wouldn't have time to tell you about kibbe and pilaf, and bulgur salads with fruit or chickpeas or nuts.