The Perfect Pantry®

Basmati rice (Recipe: aromatic rice pudding)

If you've been watching Top Chef (of course you have), you must remember this season's Episode Six, the quickfire challenge that asked the chefs to identify a range of food products by sight or by taste.

Some of the tests were easy: tapioca pearls, oatmeal, bow tie pasta (Top chefs? My six-year-old grandchildren could identify bow tie pasta.). Some were a bit more difficult: hearts of palm, fish paste, Thai eggplant.

So, here's my quickfire challenge.

Should a Top Chef be able to identify basmati rice, just by looking at it?

Yes, indeed. Pure basmati grain is four-to-five times as long as it is wide, and has a slightly and uniquely twisted tip, almost like the toe of Ali Baba's shoe.

Long grain white rice (Recipe: golden festival rice)

Sadly, I'm not much of a linguist; it's taken me a lifetime to master English, and a few dozen key words (hello, thank you, where, toilet -- sometimes used all together, just like that) in a few other languages.

Occasionally I've had the experience of being in my own country and not being able to speak the language. While this most often happens in ethnic food markets, I also had to learn the local lingo in the Cajun country of South Louisiana (pronounced, locally, loo-zee-ANN-ah), where I fell in love with jambalaya (jam-boh-LIE-ah).

For years, jambalaya was a fixture in our kitchen. I'd make it a couple of times a month or more. The heat of the Tabasco sauce is compelling; the more I used, the more I could tolerate, the more I wanted to put in the next batch, the more I craved that next batch (yes, this is the definition of addiction...).

So I needed to keep more and more long grain white rice on hand. I graduated quickly from the one-pound to the three-pound box. Now I go straight for the five-pound bag that fits perfectly into my one-gallon storage jar.

Brown rice (Recipe: vegetable fried rice)

I know what you're thinking.

Good grief, three quarts of brown rice!

What is she doing with so much rice?

Mortaring a brick patio? Filling a sandbox? Making a bean bag chair?

Blind-baking a year's worth of pies???

None of the above. This brown Nishiki rice, perfect for the rice cooker to which I am unrepentantly addicted, isn't all that easy to find in the grocery store, and the smallest package in my favorite Asian market happens to be five pounds. But I'm glad to have it in my pantry.

Sake (Recipe: pesto soba)

Accidents happen.

Blue cheese, vinegar, wine, yogurt, fish sauce, yeast breads, sake.

If modern government-regulated food storage requirements of today had been in place hundreds of years ago, we'd have none of these products, because all are the result of storage mishaps.

Thank goodness for accidents, for food left out of refrigeration too long, left in a barrel for too many months, left out in the sun or in a dark cellar, or carried through the desert in hot saddle bags on a camel's back.