The Perfect Pantry®

Sesame seeds (Recipe: asparagus in miso sauce)

If you read about The Perfect Pantry in the Washington Post, and this is your first visit, welcome. This blog looks at what a professional food writer (me!) keeps in her refrigerator, freezer, cupboards and spice rack -- with a recipe for each item -- and the 23 things I absolutely, positively, have to have in my pantry. 

Two things I don't usually do:

I don't usually write about an ingredient in The Perfect Pantry just because I have a new kitchen toy -- oops, tool -- to show you, even when it is an adorable red Japanese sesame seed grinder that looks a little bit like a Mummenschanz crossed with a Tinkertoy.

And, I don't usually give advice about love and relationships and dating and all that.

I don't. Usually. Except today.

Today, I am going to tell you how to choose your life partner.

Molasses (Recipe: Boston brown bread)

Spring has sprung, and my friend Laura is back on the yard sale circuit. And -- lucky me! -- she's already scored a couple of vintage cookbooks to add to my collection.

This week's bounty includes a book of chafing dish recipes by Fannie Farmer, and a guide to restaurants (and recipes) rated tops by employees of the Ford Motor Company -- in the 1940s. That was the heyday of motoring, of Sunday "drives in the car", before environmental awareness and gas prices hovering near US$3.50 a gallon. I love reading the descriptions of some of the historic inns all across the country, and I love the recipes -- old-fashioned, made with old-fashioned ingredients like molasses.

Other People's Pantries #13

From Zoomie (Zoomie Station), in Point Richmond, CA:

This is our pantry closet, very deep as you can see (sometimes, fog forms in the back of it), which used to be such a jumble of stuff that I could never find anything in it... (read more here.)

On Saturdays, we peek into Other People's Pantries.

Come on -- show us your pantry.

Here's how.

Yeast (Recipe: one-rise pizza dough)

If I were a Twitter person (Would that make me a Twit? Surely not.), if I really knew how to use it, how to encapsulate my day into less than 140-character sound bites, or how to find time to Twitter at all, this would be me, today:

Matzoh, matzoh, matzoh. Enough already.

And later:

Daydreaming about cinnamon buns, bagels, baguettes...

Still later:

Craving pizza w/ extra cheese and mushrooms....

And then:

Just drove past a bakery. Smells wonderful. No no no!

I'm sure if I were a Twit(ter), I'd be Twitting with lots of people who are thinking about bread in a week when we've promised not to go there.

So, instead of obsessing about bread, let's just talk about yeast, the amazing one-celled fungus that converts sugar and starch into carbon dioxide bubbles -- bubbles that get trapped in the dough, causing bread to rise (it's the rising that makes bread off-limits during this Passover holiday).