The Perfect Pantry®

Table salt (Recipe: fresh apple cake)

Nine things I know about table salt (you'll be glad to know them, too):

Other People's Pantries #96

From Lydia (that's me), in Glocester, Rhode Island:

On a weekend filled with eating and cooking and celebrating family traditions, I asked Joe Peters to let us peek into the Town of Glocester's pantry.

Stored in a space the size of my kitchen, here's what was on hand last week, to be divided among the 80 families who use the food pantry.

Nishiki rice (Recipe: chicken or turkey fried rice)

Not Quite Turkey Week, Day Three: An updated post from the archives, with new photos, links, and printer-friendly recipe.

My local Asian supermarket is the second-most-dangerous place on Earth.

Whole aisles are devoted to dried noodles, dishes and chopsticks, spicy condiments, fresh greens like choi sum and long beans and chive blossoms, tofu, soy sauce, curry pastes, frozen potstickers -- and cookware.

Danger! Danger!

I cannot resist the piles of woks, spatulas, skimmers and spiders (not the creepy-crawly kind, but the ones you use to remove food from a fryer), spice toasters, clay pots, dumpling rollers, bamboo steamers, cleavers, chopping blocks, sushi mats and ladles. I have had all of these in my pantry at one time or another, along with three -- yes, three -- rice cookers, each slightly different, that begged to come home with me.

And because I love my rice cookers, I always have Nishiki rice on hand to feed them.

Spike seasoning (Recipe: Spiked Cornish game hens)

Not Quite Turkey Week, Day Two: An updated post from the archives, with new photos, links, and printer-friendly recipe.

Helmut Eugen Benjamin Gellert Hauser must have had the world's most perfect pantry.

How else could he have concocted his famous Spike seasoning, which combines 39 ingredients (Really. 39. Can you count them in the photograph?):