The Perfect Pantry

Rice vermicelli (Recipe: faux pho)

NEW-DULL-HALL-IZZUM (noun): an addiction to the consumption of noodles, or the compulsive behavior resulting from noodle dependency (with apologies to dictionaries everywhere).

You won't find case studies about it in any medical journal, and you won't find the cure in the Physician's Desk Reference, but believe me when I tell you that noodleholism is a real problem.

I should know. I'm a noodle-holic.

Noodles are my Achilles' heel, my Lay's potato chips. I cannot pass them by. I cannot eat just one. Egg, wheat, buckwheat, rice, long, square, fresh, dried -- I love them all, and I keep every imaginable shape, size, and type of noodle in my pantry.

Rice vermicelli are among my favorite noodles (though, really, a noodle-holic doesn't play favorites). They're also called rice sticks and, in Sri Lanka, string hoppers. Despite its cross-cultural name, rice vermicelli is not Italian pasta; China and Thailand produce most of the rice noodles available at my Asian grocery store.

Powdered buttermilk (Recipe: southern buttermilk biscuits)

My grandmother used to tell me about life before everyone had a telephone and a television and a car.

No phone. Seriously, I thought she was so old.

My mother use to tell me about life before TV dinners and boil-in-bag vegetables and drive-in movies.

I thought she was so old.

Now I'm the one who's old. I remember life before computers and playstations, digital cameras and cell phones, polar fleece and pluots.

I remember when milk came from the milkman. So did chocolate milk, and buttermilk. It came in bottles, not in boxes.

Then, in the 1970s, along came powdered buttermilk, in a box, and believe it or not, that was progress. I never realized it until I moved to a more rural community, with the nearest buttermilk-stocked supermarket ten miles away.

Thyme (Recipe: honey-roasted beets with orange and thyme)

If, on some stormy December day, you look out the window and see a figure hunched over, scarf wrapped around her face, fogged-up red glasses, pink fuzzy gloves, nippers in hand, digging through the snow where she thought she remembered planting thyme last summer, you'll be looking at me.

I love thyme -- the herb that marries so well with potatoes and eggs and tomatoes and beans and beef -- and it breaks my heart to buy it at the market, when all summer long I enjoy an abundant harvest from my garden. I try to remember to dry some each Fall, in the drying screen Ted made out of an old window frame, but as much as I dry, it's never enough.

So, yes, I would rather forage for frozen thyme in my garden, or buy good-quality dried thyme from a reliable vendor like Penzeys, than spend a penny on the uninspired, aroma-free, weak-stemmed, overmisted, no-flavor thyme in the grocery store.

Coconut milk (Recipe: egg curry)

A week about stews, and the good things that come from cans.

Brother bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime
His sister had another one, she paid it for the lime

She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em both up
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em both up
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em both up
Put the lime in the coconut, she called the doctor, woke him up, and said

Doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take, I said
Doctor, to relieve this bellyache, I said...

Oops, don't know the tune? Here goes...

Where I live, neither coconuts nor limes grow on trees (we specialize in pine cones!), but there's always a can of coconut milk in my pantry.

Canned chile peppers (Recipe: slow-cooked beef and green chile stew)

A week about stews, and the good things that come from cans.

It's possible, just possible, that I have more than my share of kitchen toys.

By toys, I don't mean butter wizards and doughnut makers and zero-gravity magnetic spice racks.

I mean serious tools and cookware, in multiples, like tagines and woks, Microplane graters, half a dozen really good santoku knives and nearly two hundred wooden spoons and utensils.

The current love of my life, however, is a single: it's my new slow cooker.

Like me, the slow cooker loves all kinds of stew, so I've had fun introducing it to my collection of canned chile peppers. Chipotles in adobo and green New Mexico chiles are mainstays in my pantry, along with canned poblanos, plus fire-roasted Anaheim and other green chiles from mild to hot.

Harissa (Recipe: pumpkin stew)

A week about stews, and the good things that come from cans.

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

Ilsa didn't go to Rick's Café Americain for the food. In fact, nobody went to Rick's for the food. Drinking, yes. Smoking, of course. Gambling and trading? You betcha. A rousing chorus of La Marseillaise? Absolutely!

But food? Not a bite, and what a shame, because Rick's, the place to see and be seen in the classic film, Casablanca, surely might have had wonderful food, including couscous and tagines with spicy homemade harissa.

Pure vanilla extract (Recipe: sea bass with vanilla cream sauce)

Given a choice between chocolate and vanilla, I'll always pick chocolate.

Chocolate ice cream and chocolate cookies. Chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

Brownies over blondies.

And yet I've found quite a lot of pure vanilla extract in The Perfect Pantry.

All of my favorite chocolate desserts contain vanilla extract, because it's vanilla that gives chocolate the rich flavor we love. Specifically, Madagascar Bourbon vanilla is what's most familiar to our taste buds.

Meringue powder (Recipe: royal icing)

The items in The Perfect Pantry fall into three categories.

Use it once a day (onions, mustard, spices),

Use it less often, but in many ways (pasta, chili paste, rice).

Use it only one way, but for that one way, nothing else will do.

Meringue powder is one of those one-time, one-way items.

Once a year, when I'm organizing Drop In & Decorate Cookies for Donation events, I stock up on dozens of ounces of meringue powder, which is nothing more than dried egg white mixed with sugar, cornstarch and arabic gums to stabilize and bind it. When mixed with water and confectioners sugar, meringue powder has the same consistency as beaten egg whites, but magically it morphs into royal icing. And when royal icing is colored, applied to cookies, and left to harden, it morphs into a work of art.

Rolled oats (Recipe: apple-pear-cranberry crisp)

In the 1960s, my parents called me a crunchy-granola head.

They weren't wrong.

I wore Earth Shoes. I memorized the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Patchen. I shopped at a health food store called Erehwon, the opposite of Nowhere. I gave up chicken for tofu. I drank herbal tea and burned incense and wore love beads and actually said things like groovy, man and hep cat.

I baked my own bread (my parents saw this as incontrovertible proof of my granola-ness).

By 1978, I'd gone back to eating chicken, tossed the love beads, and traded my Earth Shoes for the Birkenstocks I wear every day (yes, I'm still a little bit crunchy-granola). I bought the newly-published Moosewood Cookbook, and Mollie Katzen's recipes sent me to the health food store once again, for exotic-in-the-1970s ingredients like wheat germ and miso paste and rolled oats.

Agave nectar (Recipe: pan-roasted glazed salmon)

In many ways, I am clueless.

I don't have an iPod or an iPhone. I've never played Wii, or watched all of the Star Wars films or High School Musical (though granddaughter Sabina can tell me all about it). I can't name the "in" colors for Fall, or the newest cocktail. I don't know who won American Idol, who's Dancing with the Stars, or who will be The Next Iron Chef.

And though cooks have been talking about it for years, until quite recently I never knew anything about agave nectar.

Agave (pronounced ah-GAH-vay) nectar, or syrup, is a new product derived from an ancient plant native to the state of Jalisco in central Mexico. Extracted from several varieties of wild agave, this natural sweetener has come into its own as a substitute for both sugar and honey, and it's found a permanent place in The Perfect Pantry.