The Perfect Pantry

Worcestershire sauce (Recipe: black bean dip)

While I'm busy baking hundreds of cookies for this weekend's Drop In & Decorate® cookies-for-donation event, please enjoy this post from the archives, updated with new photos, links and recipe.

In 1981, the US Department of the Army was "honored" by Taxpayers for Common Sense with their Golden Fleece Award, for spending $6,000 to prepare a 17-page manual on how to buy Worcestershire sauce.

Not to worry, friends; you don't need to read the report. I'm going to tell you how to buy Worcestershire sauce (I'll even tell you how to use it), and my advice won't cost you a penny.

Slow-roasted tomatoes (Recipe: goat cheese and basil bruschetta)

Yes, friends, it's that time of year.

Time to make daily runs to the farm stand up the road.

Time to call Elwood to track down a few heads of his home-grown garlic.

Time to pull some fragrant thyme from my garden.

Time to bring out my favorite sea salt that Katie sent from France.

Time to make slow-roasted tomatoes.

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.

Dried peppers (Recipe: savory romesco sauce)

Imagine Laurel without Hardy, Wallace without Gromit, Carrie Bradshaw without Manolo Blahnik.

Unthinkable.

Burgers without buns? Mac without cheese?

Absolutely not.

The Perfect Pantry without dried chile peppers?

Never!

In fact, at this very moment, I have five -- no, six -- uh, seven varieties of dried chiles on hand, not including the peppers in the photo, which went into the recipe below. I've got habañero and the tiny piquin (pronounced pay KEEN), for pure fire. Ancho (smoked poblanos), chipotles (smoked jalapeños) and guajillo, not too hot, for smoky richness. Mulato, dark brown, sweet and a bit fruity, medium hot. Sanaam, small and red, used in Indian cooking (I'm just starting to experiment with these). And, of course, New Mexico red chiles, medium hot and all-purpose.

Discos (Recipe: goat cheese-olive empanadas)

I'm ready to sell our little log house, and move back to the city.

I'm ready to give up my herb garden, the one right outside the kitchen door.

I'm ready to say goodbye to my wonderful kitchen with -- finally -- enough counter space, and to the fire pit Ted built so we could cook paella and toast marshmallows for s'mores.

I'm ready to live without my beloved screened porch, the site of winter grilling and summer aioli-making, with a table that seats 12, or 14, or sometimes 16.

I'm ready to give it all up, to live closer to a supermarket that carries Goya frozen foods.

Not even all Goya foods.

Just one.

Discos.

Wait... you haven't tried them?

Herbes de Provence (Recipe: marinated bocconcini)

Who was more ingenious, the Provencal cook who first tossed together a few herbs growing on a hillside and gave it a fancy-sounding name -- herbes de Provence -- or the person who thought to market those herbs in an adorable ceramic crock ?

(You have one of those iconic little crocks on your spice rack, don't you? Me, too.)

Cumin (Recipe: pinto bean ravioli)

Spices That Make Your Food Sing Week, Day Three.

If cumin really could make your food sing, what tune would it choose?

A bit of Mexican mariachi?

Native American pow-wow?

Spanish flamenco?

Or would your cumin groove to a Bollywood beat?

More than most seasonings -- except salt and pepper --  cumin plays a key role in the cuisine of so many regions that it's impossible to imagine a pantry (or a music collection) without it.

Phyllo shells (Recipe: one-bite vegetable quiche)

Does your house sometimes feel like a bed-and-breakfast inn, with a steady stream of guests coming and going?

When you live in a log house in the woods, with a great kitchen and a fireplace and a big screened porch and indoor plumbing, you get plenty of company. (Yes, people ask. Do we need sleeping bags? Do you have towels? Should we bring flashlights? I remind them that, even out here in the woods, we have a dishwasher and DSL.)

If you're me, you love having people come to visit. Of course, if you're me, you don't bake, so you're always on the lookout for ingredients to keep in the pantry for easy entertaining.

When it comes to pastry, I'm all thumbs. Forget making it from scratch; even a store-bought pie dough becomes silly putty in my hands. However, a bit of pastry can dress up almost anything, from scrambled eggs to hummus to leftover Chinese food, so I stash a few boxes of phyllo shells in the freezer.

Aleppo pepper (Recipe: muhammara — walnut and pomegranate paste)

This week we're cooking with pantry items from one of my favorite regions, the Eastern Mediterranean. Welcome to Fertile Crescent Week, Day One.

People in Boston -- home of the Kennedys, Parker House rolls, and some very smart folks at the World's Greatest University -- associate the word Aleppo not with northern Syria or caravanserais, but with large men in tiny cars and red fez hats, doing crazy-eights in the middle of the street.

Boston is home to the Aleppo Shriners, a fraternal order founded in 1882, part of a national organization that supports Shriners Hospitals for Children and specialized burn centers around the country.

Like Shriners everywhere, they are parade entertainers par excellence.

Yes, they can drive, but I wonder... do they cook?

And do they use Aleppo pepper?

Until recently, I didn't. Oh, I'd read about it in cooking magazines, and seen it on some trendy restaurant menus, but I already had so many peppers in my pantry. Did I really need another one?

After several Pantry readers pointed out the gap in my spice rack, I tried Aleppo pepper, and I fell in love.

Panko (Recipe: chicken fingers)

I'm the same age, give or take a couple of months, as Peeps and Swanson TV Dinners, but I'm forty years older than panko.

Neither a dance, nor an exercise regimen, nor very cool drum-beating music, panko are the Japanese bread crumbs that have taken Western cooking by storm over the past five years or so. More coarse than traditional dried bread crumbs, panko are really bread flakes; the flakes absorb less moisture and, therefore, food made with them stays more crisp.