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.

Frozen puff pastry (Recipe: asparagus gruyere tart)

Pâte feuilletée.

POT FEH-YOU-TAY.

Just the thought of making something with such an elegant name scares the bedoodles out of me. If I hadn't watched Julia Child on television, smearing the butter and folding and turning and folding and turning again, making it all seem so utterly doable, I never would have tried to make puff pastry from scratch.

I did make it.

One time.

Then I discovered frozen puff pastry. Someone else does the smearing and folding and turning for you. Imagine that! Puff pastry any time, without devoting an entire day to making it.

Bookworm on the coast

Toni, from San Diego, California, is this week's Bookworm in the Pantry . On Daily Bread Journal, Toni writes about food, family, and health. About herself, she writes, "I'm congenitally incapable of following a recipe, so my adventures in food have always had an original flavor. I've maintained a successful acupuncture practice for over 15 years, and aside from acupuncture and herbs, I counsel my patients on food, exercise and mindfulness meditation. Aside from cooking, my other main hobby is photography." She's just back from a trip to India, so watch her blog for photos.

UPDATE. Toni recommended:

• The Art of Eating
• French Lessons
• Why We Eat What We Eat
• A Natural History of the Senses
• Physiology of Taste

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.

Piment d'Espelette (Recipe: chicken basquaise with piperade)

On the last weekend in October, thousands of people will crowd into the narrow streets of the town of Espelette, in the Basque region of southwest France, for The Celebration of Peppers, honoring the area's most famous agricultural product: piment d'Espelette.

I'm partial to any food that merits an entire festival held in its name (Gilroy garlic, Hatch chiles, Crisfield crabs). I'm also partial to any food that comes from only one place on Earth.

Piment d'Espelette is a one-place-on-Earth, deserves-a-parade, sweet-hot pepper produced in only ten small villages in France with a total growing area of just 3,000 acres, earning it the coveted Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) designation.

Dal, beans, lentils (Recipe: Punjab five jewels)

In Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food, dal fills a third of a page between Dagestan and damson.

Open any Indian cookbook, however, and you'll see that dal (or dhal) fills much more than a third of a page; it's one of the mainstays of both northern and southern Indian cooking, an important source of protein served at almost every meal.

Bottled salad dressing (Recipe: hot roasted veggies)

Psssst. I've got a secret.

Paul Newman is playing peek-a-boo in my refrigerator. And he's not alone.

You'll always find three or four bottled salad dressings hiding in there with him.

These salad dressings aren't for salad; they're the best, quickest marinades in the world.

A Bookworm in Manila

Bookworms are everywhere! Christine, this week's Bookworm in the Pantry, creates her lovely blog, Ramblings from a Gypsy Soul, in Manila, The Philippines . Whenever I read her posts, I learn something new about Filipino culture and cuisine — and, of course, I want to get on a plane and go to the places she visits. Christine has traveled to the US, Thailand, Mexico, Vietnam, Egypt, and more. She photographs, she cooks, and, oh yes, she reads; her wish list features dozens of books I'd love to have in my own library.

UPDATE. Christine recommended:

• Feeding a Yen
• Havana Salsa
• The Mistress of Spices
• Her Fork in the Road
• Extra Virgin
  

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.