The Perfect Pantry®

Preserved lemons (Recipe: Couscous salad with herbs)

In the deep recesses of my pantry, large wire racks hold the cookware I don't use every day: three stacks of dim-sum size bamboo steamers, two orange mini coquettes, a plastic box of sushi-making gear, a handful of Bundt pans, three paella pans, one red cast iron karahi, and six conical-topped tagines.

Before the day I bought, on super-dooper sale, my first tagine in a tiny store that was going out of business, I knew nothing about Moroccan cooking. The shop owner included one of her favorite recipes for a traditional chicken and olive stew.

One of the ingredients listed was preserved lemons. I had no idea what they were and asked whether I could substitute fresh lemons instead.

No, no! she replied. The preserved lemons are absolutely essential.

One taste, and I knew just what she meant.

Nutella®, a Pantry Special (recipe: banana or strawberry Nutella quesadillas)

Pantry Specials are great ingredients that find their way into my pantry from time to time, but not all the time.

When I suggested to my pastry chef friend Cindy that we make Nutella® quesadillas for dessert last week, she asked, "Italian Nutella or Canadian Nutella?" I had no idea what she meant, but a bit of research turned up the answer. Though the Ferrero corporation owns the trademark, the actual chocolate-hazelnut-skim-milk spread made in Italy since the 1940s is not the same product made in Canada and imported to America for the past twenty years. Canadian Nutella contains more chocolate and more sugar, and less hazelnut, than the Italian original. You'll find Nutella on the supermarket shelf with peanut butter, which makes sense; it tastes enough like chocolate peanut butter that I'm sure Elvis would have loved to spread it on his signature sandwich. Stored at room temperature (never in the refrigerator), Nutella keeps for months, though it seldom lasts that long in my house.

Other People's Pantries #74

From Lili, in Prior Lake, Minnesota:

All I can say is I LOVE my pantry! My husband always says, no matter how big or small my pantry is, somehow I fill it up! True..... but.... I need all this food so I can cook whatever the mood strikes me, no matter when. I can't stand the idea of not having an ingredient when I need to make something special! I'm not any better with the freezers -- my other "pantry"!

Coconut milk (Recipe: chicken satay)

Eight things I know about coconut milk (you'll be glad to know them, too):