The Perfect Pantry®

First light, first pantry, first soup, part one

Ted and I celebrate the dawn of the New Year with friends who live nearby. We light a bonfire out in the middle of their field at sun-up, and greet the First Light with warmth, good wishes, occasional poems and abundantly hot coffee. Most important, though, are the friends, old and new, with whom we welcome each new year.

This year, I'm so pleased to start the year with Arlo, a Pantry reader who sent the following to me in November. Since then, we have shared many thoughts and memories, and a new friendship. With her kind permission, I'm happy to share her letter with you. (The photo is of my own spice rack, which Ted built from an old door we found in our barn.)

Greetings from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I just wanted to tell you how much The Perfect Pantry helped me through a bad time during these past few weeks and to thank you. I will not go through any of the soapy details, but it was not blissful domesticity here for a period of time. I am a mother and wife, with four of my five children still living at home. Every morning, after they all go to school or work, I faithfully look for a job as living in our nation's capital is expensive. After these devotions, I reward myself with exactly one hour of e-mails, visiting my favourite websites and blogs, etc.

Earlier this month, after a particularly depressing morning, I stayed on longer than my 60 minutes. I did not want to do the recycling, find homes for the kittens or ever become employed again. Ottawa can go for days without sunshine in the autumn and this always affects me. So I putzed around following links into many food sites, and not sure exactly how I came across the Perfect Pantry but I stopped surfing after that. Your site made me abandon my morning routine (yikes) and made me smile while doing so.

A more perfect pantry?

In addition to the many obsessions I've confessed over the past year (noodle-holism, a collection of two hundred wooden spoons, and an unhealthy relationship with a product that can only, by law, be called salad dressing), I am also a compulsive list maker.

At this time of year, my list-making obsession kicks into high gear.

I keep lists of things to do, of things to sort, of things to buy, of things to cook. I make lists for me, and lists for Ted. The joke in my house: "my lists have lists."

So when Nupur of One Hot Stove, my favorite blog about Indian cuisine, suggested sharing a Best of 2007 list, I was way ahead; I have lots of lists in The Perfect Pantry, and those lists have lists, too.

Beef broth (Recipe: hot and sour soup)

Whenever Kim and Nick and Sabina and Ramona, my favorite vegetarians, come for a visit, I run to the pantry to purge all of the carnivorous contraband.

(Well, okay, not everything. Not the stuff in the freezer, the meat sauce and beef stew and turkey hot dogs and the fish my friend Bob caught last summer, hiding in the back behind the veggie-friendly organic pizza and tofu pups.)

This time, the only no-no items I found on the pantry shelves were "stock" items: chicken and beef broth.

Sambar powder (Recipe: pan-seared ahi with mango)

I have an overprotective spam filter.

Most of the time, I'm grateful; it insulates me from people who want to enhance (or reduce) my maleness, sell me fake watches or software, or do things in Russian that I'm glad I can't understand.

Sometimes -- like my dad, who used to wait at the door in his bathrobe, hoping to scare away the high school boys who wanted to kiss me goodnight after a date -- my spam filter goes too far.

It almost "protected" me from Venkat Balasubramani and his wonderful sambar powder.

One of the promises I've made for the new year is to learn more about the complexity and rich variety of Indian cooking, so when Venkat, an attorney in Seattle, wrote to offer a free sample of the product he and his mother market, I was eager to try it. First, though, I had to read up about sambar.