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)

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.