The Perfect Pantry®

Recipe for turkey, kale and cheese quesadillas

To tell you my husband Ted and I loved these quesadillas would be an understatement. So, I'll just tell you that we devoured them three days in a row, which, if you have lots and lots of turkey leftovers, is a good thing to know. Pull out any shredded cheese you have in your freezer, any salsa (or chutney, or even leftover cranberry sauce) from the fridge, and any type of tortillas you have on hand; I love these habanero-lime tortillas from Trader Joe's, which are both orange and spicy. Cook the kale with salsa or sofrito to give it a bit of a kick, and you have a quesadilla so good you'll forget you're eating Thanksgiving leftovers.

Recipe for Caribbean chicken curry with butternut squash and red bell pepper

Lately I've been having a lot of fun adapting stove top recipes for my slow cooker. This time, I've done just the opposite, tweaking a slow cooker recipe for stove top cooking. I adore the flavor profiles of Caribbean cuisine, yet I haven't often shared recipes from that part of the world. I intend to remedy that situation immediately, starting with this chicken curry with butternut squash and red bell pepper. Allspice and ginger, two of the signature seasonings of Caribbean cooking, have a prominent role here, and coconut milk holds it all together. The curry is mildly spicy, so adjust to your own taste by adding or cutting back on the hot pepper.

Recipe for hurricane turkey "fridge dump" soup

Here at the log house, my husband Ted and I prepared to face Hurricane Sandy and the sure-to-follow days without electricity. We loaded up on bottled water and batteries, cat food and cat litter. We brought the light-weight porch furniture indoors. We washed the laundry and ran the dishwasher, put the car in the barn, filled a large thermos with coffee, and charged cell phones and laptops. And I cooked, and cooked, and cooked, to turn as much perishable food as possible into freezer meals that could last a few days, even without power. This turkey soup began as an unpremeditated "fridge dump", but as I went along, I kept good notes. Thank heavens for that, because this is a soup I want to make again, deliberately, and often. (In fact, as soon as our power was restored, I made my second batch, just as good as the first.) I used my slow cooker, but you can make it in a Dutch oven on the stove-top; the recipe includes instructions for both cooking methods.

Slow cooker recipe for my mom's circa-1960 chicken and rice casserole

In the 1960s, my parents -- like the parents of all of my friends -- entertained by hosting bridge parties. Out came the card tables and the bowls of Chex mix, the cocktails and rumaki. Occasionally, though, the parties involved dinner, and on those occasions, my mother pulled out her one and only "party" dish, baked chicken and rice casserole with onions and mushrooms. It sounds rather ordinary, I know, but in fact it met the test for great party food: you had to make it in advance, and it was so good that people didn't mind eating it again and again. I haven't had that casserole in many years, but the taste memory stayed with me, and I decided to adapt it for the slow cooker. My mother used chicken pieces on the bone; I went with boneless, skinless chicken thighs, for less fat in the finished dish. In the oven, the onions get a bit browned; I began by caramelizing the onions in the slow cooker before adding the rest of the ingredients. Rice isn't easy to get right in the slow cooker; I substituted converted rice and added it with the chicken. All in all, I loved this recreation of my mother's best dish. If only I'd learned to play bridge.