The Perfect Pantry

Powdered buttermilk (Recipe: pear spice cupcakes)

When you drive toward my town from pretty much anywhere, you pass a mall or two.

Big box stores, little box stores, grocery stores and discount stores. Drive-through doughnuts, drive-up banking. Hardware, software, sportswear.

It's hard to believe that, a century ago, apple orchards and dairy farms, punctuated by occasional clusters of tiny wood-shingled houses along the road, were all you'd find around here. Today, what remains is the name -- Apple Valley -- and just a handful of orchards.

Our house is on the outskirts of Apple Valley, five or ten miles from here to one of those grocery stores, not far to drive in good weather but not fun in the winter. So, at this time of year, I always keep shelf-stable milk and powdered buttermilk in my pantry.

Mahlab (Recipe: Armenian brioche filled with dates, honey and walnuts)

Today, another guest post by one of the food bloggers I've adopted through the Adopt-a-Blogger mentoring program. (Please be sure to visit their terrific blogs.) Today, meet Sandie of Inn Cuisine, the second blog I adopted. Sandie, a writer based in Kansas City, specializes in recipes from bed and breakfasts, country and urban inns, as well as cooking with local, sustainable foods. Her blog is full of recipes you'll love to have in your repertoire when entertaining family, friends and guests at home.

Guest post and photos by Sandie of Inn Cuisine.

As an avid reader of The Perfect Pantry, I have learned much from Lydia’s work: from interesting facts about ingredients I thought I knew, to discovering products and spices completely foreign to me. That’s why, when Lydia asked if I would write a guest post, my mind raced. What pantry ingredient could I feature? What recipe could I share?

In Perfect Pantry style, I decided to push myself, learn about and cook with a pantry item I had not previously heard of or experienced: mahlab.

Whole wheat flour (Recipe: grilled pizza)

Have you tried grilled pizza? While I'm on vacation, please enjoy this updated post, with new photos and links, and a printer-friendly recipe.

I'm an every-other-decade kind of baker.

In the 1960s and again in the 1980s, I baked bread, sometimes every week. I started with a basic recipe for white bread, from the classic Beard on Bread, and slowly I branched out.

My pantry reflected that bread passion, with jars of unbleached all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, rye, semolina, oatmeal, seeds and nuts and grains from the local health food store.

Now that we're nearer to the end of the 00 decade than to the beginning, I'm feeling the urge to bake again. I bought Dorie Greenspan's book. Ted's run off with it, but I'm not complaining; he made glorious lemon madeleines. And brioche. And French toast from the brioche...

Cardamom (Recipe: Finnish pulla bread)

Ten things I know about cardamom (you'll be glad to know them, too):

Baking powder (Recipe: blue corn muffins)

From the archives, a favorite post, updated with a new recipe, photos and links.

If baking powder were an opera, the libretto might read:

Act I: Poor little BP lives a quiet life on a cool, dark shelf. Enter The Baker, who introduces BP to Wet. Bubbles appear.

Act II: The Baker, sensing something dramatic might be happening, then introduces BP and Wet to Heat, and kaboom! Bubbles appear again. The Baker encourages BP, Wet and Heat to travel together to Muffin Land, and they have adventures along the way.

Act III: Out of the oven the Baker pulls beautiful muffins, all puffed up and proud, thanks to BP's double-bubble action.

And they all live happily ever after.

Actually, except for The Baker, they all get eaten in the end...which, of course, is a happy ending for us.

Maple syrup (Recipes: maple nut bread and a maple cocktail)

Guest post and photos by Sarah in Boston.

My dad had a way of making the simplest foods into a celebration.

He spent a lot of his free time in his backyard garden, talking to robins and tilling the soil with his trusty hoe. Each garden season was met with great anticipation: the first rhubarb, green onions, beefsteak tomatoes, basketball-sized cabbage heads -- you name it, he grew it.

For each thing he grew, he created a special ritual to enjoy it, something as simple as walking around with a pocketful of salt so he could eat radishes and cucumbers right out of the garden.

He had his special ways of enjoying other foods, too, like red-skinned peanuts and cold, locally made hot dogs. He was very particular about the hot dogs. He would never eat packaged ones raw, but the ones they made at Tom’s Market he ate by the pound. If I close my eyes, I can still see him sitting at the picnic table, listening to the Detroit Tigers on the radio, with a pound of peanuts and a plastic Tupperware tub of hot dogs, watching his garden, and sometimes fiddling with his car.

Another favorite was maple syrup, and of course he created a family ceremony around the annual spring tapping of the sugar maple in our front yard.

Sherry vinegar (Recipe: bread salad with roasted tomato vinaigrette)

Ten things I know about sherry vinegar (you'll be glad to know them, too):

Sea salt (Recipe: Schlottz's knots)

A week of ingredients featured in kid-friendly recipes from the Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook by Georgeanne Brennan. Welcome to Dr. Seuss Week, Day One.

Here's the kind of question Dr. Seuss would have loved:

If the sea is blue, why is sea salt white, or grey, or pink?

Fresh pizza dough, and a birthday cookbook giveaway (Recipe: peachy mama pizza)

Never let it be said that Rhode Islanders don't know their pizza.

Pizza is a way of life here. On Federal Hill, the most Italian neighborhood in the most Italian state in the country, even the local bar grills pizza in a wood-fired oven. Thick crust or thin, from North Providence to Newport, you can find above-average pizza everywhere, including in our middle-of-nowhere village five miles up the road.

And, because we love our pizza, every market sells fresh pizza dough, often from the local pizzeria or from a comissary not more than a few minutes from the store.

All-purpose flour (Recipe: cheddar cheese biscuits)

Updated from the archives, with new links, recipe and photo.

For the most part, I don't believe in "one size fits all," because I am a size and shape that one size never seems to fit.

And while in my pantry I have half a dozen types of flour -- surprising, given that I'm a notorious bake-o-phobe -- the one I reach for more often than not is "one size fits all," also known as all-purpose flour.