The Perfect Pantry®

Lavender, and a purple haze (Recipe: pork tenderloin with grilled lavender peaches)

Please welcome Marcia, who with this post joins The Perfect Pantry as guest blogger. She lives up the road from me, in a lovely old house with several vegetable and flower gardens, surrounded by acres of woodland. Professionally, she's been a teacher, children's librarian, naturalist and goat farmer. An avid cook and baker, Marcia will share stories and recipes once a month or so.

Guest post and photos by Marcia in Rhode Island

Lavender is a frivolous yet ever-present staple in my pantry. Occasionally my garden yields a few tablespoons, just enough for lavender madeleines when I’m feeling peckish and reminiscent, but most of the time, I buy buds and flowers embalmed in plastic packets.   

Until today.
   
“Pick your own lavender and distill the color of our garden into your kitchen,” promised the ad that ran in our local paper a couple of weeks ago.

And I’d been waiting. Because I am sure you don’t pick lavender on just any day.

Other People's Pantries #31

From Laura, in Oakland, California:

My pantry has evolved over the eight years I have lived here. I put the most frequently used items on the low shelves since I am not very tall. I buy small quantities of spices, dried herbs, dried beans, etc. in bulk and store them in recycled jars with post-it labels on the outside. I try to keep the dried herbs and spices in alpha order.

Black vinegar (Recipe: peanut dipping sauce)

There's a saying -- a joke -- in my house:

The more you have, the more you buy.

Now, I am not a shopaholic. Really. Oh, occasionally I might go a bit over budget in restaurant supply stores, or a certain favorite used cookbook shop near Fall River, Massachusetts. Or late at night on eBay, when I'm cruising the melamine bowl listings. Or in a shop that sells hand-dyed yarns or Japanese note papers embedded with bits of leaves and gold flecks...

No, in this case, the "you" is me, and the "more" is vinegar. I've had a mental block about it for years. I never remember how much regular distilled vinegar I have in the pantry, or whether I have any of the special ones like champagne or raspberry or seasoned rice or organic cider vinegar hand-pressed somewhere in Canada.

So I buy them all, over and over again, which explains why I have two bottles of black vinegar in my pantry.

Red curry paste (Recipe: red curry mussel stew)

Sometimes it takes a waiter with attitude to remind me of the value of a great pantry.

Last month, while visiting San Francisco, Ted and I and two of my favorite blogging friends went to dinner at the Fog City Diner, which has been a fixture on the dining scene since 1985.

We ordered a few different starters; I recall a tuna-avocado thing, and a nice salad with local greens. Ted chose a curried mussel stew, served with slices of baguette. While the other appetizers were good, the mussel stew was transcendent, and the four of us descended upon it until we'd dunked and devoured all of the bread and had to ask for more to mop up every bit.

When our waiter returned to clear the licked-clean soup bowl, we asked whether the chef would be willing to share the recipe.

Oh, it's not that hard, he replied. I'm sure you can figure it out.

And he walked away.

After a few seconds, we realized that no recipe would be forthcoming, but we agreed that yes, we surely could figure it out.

And so I returned to Rhode Island, to my well-stocked pantry, to extricate a can of coconut milk and my stash of red curry paste, for clearly those were the key ingredients in the mussel stew.