The Perfect Pantry

Canned tomatoes (Recipe: cioppino)

You like potato and I like potahto,
You like tomato and I like tomahto;
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto!
Let's call the whole thing off!

Are you a member of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Rainy Sunday Afternoon Romantic Comedy Movie Club?

Okay, there is no such club, but if there were, I would be its president. And if you were a member, you'd surely recognize this classic song from Swing Time.

It's a love song, and it's not really about potatoes and tomatoes.

But if there were a love song about tomatoes, I'd be singing along.

A New Orleans pantry giveaway (Recipe: red bean and cheese burritos)

Laissez le bon temps rouller!

Although I don't speak Parisian or Provencal French, or Cajun French, or even the taxi-driver French my husband learned in Montreal, I know what this means.

Let the good times roll!

I still remember everything about our first visit to South Louisiana, where I learned the true meaning of laissez le bon temps rouller. Street life in the French Quarter. Zydeco, and jazz at Preservation Hall. The streetcar named Desire. Voodoo, plantation houses, and the pervading aroma of vinegar on Avery Island.

And the food? Oh, yes, the food: a beignet at Cafe du Monde, a muffaletta from Central Grocery, an oyster po' boy. Waiting on line for hours for shrimp etouffee at K-Paul's. Waiting on line in the middle of the street, with businessmen and politicians, for lunch at Galatoire's. Squeezing the crawfish tails and sucking the heads (or is it the other way around?) at Hymel's with the LSU game on the big-screen TV.

There is no more vibrant regional food culture in America than in New Orleans, and the nice folks at Zatarain's have offered a great New Orleans pantry giveaway to introduce you to some of the traditional foods of their home town.

Old Bay Seasoning (Recipe: New England shrimp boil)

When I was growing up in the metro New York area, my Cousin Martin was growing up in Maryland.

Several times a year, we packed up the car and drove south to visit. My father loved to drive, and, even more, loved to discover new routes to the same old places. A detour of 50 miles was perfectly acceptable, if the road proved interesting or scenic, or if we found a shack with great food along the way.

As we motored through Delaware into Maryland, the road stayed the same but the food changed.

We were driving through crab country.

Every little roadside eatery sold crab cakes, and every concession stand at the highway rest stops sold Old Bay Seasoning. It was the best souvenir of our travels, and my mother always picked up a tin on the way home.

Spike seasoning (Recipe: grilled chicken salad)

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

How else could he have concocted the latest addition to my own pantry -- his famous Spike seasoning -- which combines 39 ingredients (Really. 39. Can you count them in the photograph?):

Pie crust (Recipe: as-American-as apple pie)

All this week, I'm updating posts from the very first month of The Perfect Pantry. New links, new photos, and some great recipes for summer.

When I was growing up, my family didn't "do" dessert.

I don't mean that we didn't eat it. We did, but dessert in our house meant one of two things: fresh fruit, or coffee-chip ice cream by the quart from Grunings, our local ice cream parlor.

There was no in-between.

And so, there was no pie, no making of pie crust, no learning how to criss-cross the lattice.

Low-carb pasta (Recipe: Tex-Mex penne)

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. 

Wehd ya fine dat penny riggAHHHHduh?

When I first moved from Boston to Rhode Island, I didn't speak the language. Eight years later, I'm starting to catch on.

Where'd you find that penne rigate?

That's what the cashier at my local supermarket asked me as he scanned the box in the checkout line. It was the colorful-but-not-blue design (and, by the way, why do so many pastas come in blue boxes?) that caught the cashier's eye.

What caught my eye was the promise of a low-carb pasta that didn't have the texture of wallpaper paste or taste like wet cardboard.

Hot sauce (Recipe: shrimp etouffee)

Once upon a time, there lived a maiden so afraid of spicy food that nary a Szechuan dumpling, nor a bite of chicken with Thai red curry sauce, nor a nacho's worth of salsa ever passed her lips.

In her kitchen, a bottle of Tabasco hot sauce filled the space on the spice rack where hot sauce is supposed to be, though the maiden's specimen was aging slowly from red to brown, separating in the bottle and gathering dust.

Then, one day, the maiden and Ted and Cousin Martin traveled to New Orleans. She tasted jambalaya and blackened catfish, po' boys and shrimp caught fresh in the Gulf of Mexico. She visited Avery Island, the temple of Tabasco, where she walked up and down the rows of pepper plants, breathing in the aroma of pepper and vinegar.

There was hot sauce everywhere, and the maiden fell in love.