The Perfect Pantry

Artificial sweetener (Recipe: asparagus, nectarine and tomato salad)

Some pantry ingredients make life worth living.

Others make life livable.

In the first group: chocolate, balsamic vinegar, parmigiano-reggiano.

In the second group: Fresca, fat-free yogurt, artificial sweetener.

A gourmet ingredient it is not, but in a household of dieters and diabetics, artificial sweetener is our reality.

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

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

Tequila (Recipe: tequila-lime flank steak, grilled cherry tomato salsa, and a classic margarita)

Please welcome Bryan, who with this post joins The Perfect Pantry as a guest blogger. By day, he's an experience design consultant; he's also a former bartender who studied at the Boston University Wine Resource Center. Bryan is passionate about local and sustainable food, dabbles in photography, and makes a mean mojito. He’s here to to raid that other kitchen cubbyhole most of us have: the liquor cabinet. You'll find more of Bryan's recipes at Vinilicious, which he vows to start up again.

Guest post and photos by Bryan in Boston.

I used to bartend some years back at a jazz club, and at the end of my shift it was a habit of mine to mix up a tall, classic margarita.

I’m not talking about what passes for a marg at the neighborhood Chili’s, made with dash of Jose Cuervo, a bit of triple sec, and two or three glugs of sugary sour mix. This was the real deal: 100% blue agave tequila, Cointreau, topped up with freshly squeezed lime juice, rimmed with salt crystals the size of small stones.

The jazz club doubled as a restaurant. Nothing fancy, really -- steak tips, buffalo wings, and the sort -- but after an eight-hour shift standing behind a counter and slinging cocktails to parched salsa dancers, an order of overcooked steak tips tasted like just the closest thing to heaven.

After one particularly busy night, I accidentally spilled my margarita into my steak tips. I don’t remember what I was thinking -- perhaps I was just way too hungry to pick up takeout on the way home -- but I ate them anyway. What I do remember was that they tasted better than they did when they'd come out of the kitchen. (The soaked fries, not so much.)

Nutella®, a Pantry Special (recipe: banana or strawberry quesadillas)

Pantry Specials are great ingredients that find their way into my pantry from time to time, but not all the time. In this occasional series of short posts, you'll find information and recipes for foods that might not be on your local supermarket's shelves, but are available online.

When I suggested to my pastry chef friend Cindy that we make Nutella® quesadillas for dessert last week, she asked, "Italian Nutella or Canadian Nutella?" I had no idea what she meant, but a bit of research turned up the answer. Though the Ferrero corporation owns the trademark, the actual chocolate-hazelnut-skim-milk spread made in Italy since the 1940s is not the same product made in Canada and imported to America for the past twenty years. Canadian Nutella contains more chocolate and more sugar, and less hazelnut, than the Italian original. You'll find Nutella on the supermarket shelf with peanut butter, which makes sense; it tastes enough like chocolate peanut butter that I'm sure Elvis would have loved to spread it on his signature sandwich. Stored at room temperature (never in the refrigerator), Nutella keeps for months, though it seldom lasts that long in my house.

Coconut milk (Recipe: chicken satay)

Eight things I know about coconut milk (you'll be glad to know them, too):

Kecap manis (Recipe: nasi goreng/Indonesian fried rice)

An updated post from the archives, with a simpler version of the original recipe, plus new photos and links.

What does ABC mean to you?

Something fundamental, yes? A starting point. A building block.

In the world of food, ABC reminds me of two things.

First, an ABC I don't keep in the pantry: When Ted and Cousin Martin and I traveled through Malaysia, we tasted a dessert called ABC, air batu campur -- literally, "water stone mix" --  a mound of shave ice topped, improbably, with red beans, sweet corn, grass jelly and a drizzle of evaporated milk. Also called ais kacang, it looked like a kind of psychedelic sno-cone.

Second, an ABC I always have in my pantry: kecap manis, a wonderful, sweet soy sauce sold under the ABC brand and, in our house, known as "that ABC stuff in the cupboard."

The not-yet-perfect pantry: What's missing? (Recipe: white bean garlic dip)

My friend Bob sent me an email last week:

So...... what's going to be the 250th ingredient in your pantry?

I know what you're thinking.

The Perfect Pantry's cupboard: 118 essential ingredients

Three things I always have in the pantry.

All this week I'm celebrating the three-year anniversary of The Perfect Pantry (shouldn't every celebration last for an entire week?) by sharing the inventory of the ingredients in my pantry.

Today's list covers the amorphous category of cupboard: dry goods, canned goods, bottled and jarred goods, and I-don't-know-where-else-to-put-them goods.

White whole wheat flour (Recipe: carrot cake cupcakes with lemon frosting)

In a famous series of television commercials from the 1970s, we watched the patrons in restaurants around the country as a male voice-over whispered, "We are here at (insert name of fine-dining restaurant), where we've secretly replaced the fine coffee they usually serve with (the instant brand). Let's see if anyone can tell the difference."

Of course, nobody could tell the difference. Not one single coffee drinker.

That's how it works in TV land, but that's also how it works in my kitchen when I substitute white whole wheat flour for the all-purpose unbleached white flour I usually use.

Granulated sugar (Recipe: strawberry rhubarb jam)

On a shelf in my kitchen, fourteen glass storage jars, all the same size and shape, hold things we use every day.

Special-K, oat bran flakes and granola.

Dried beans in shades of red and white and pink and pied, all mixed together.

Leftover dried pasta in a variety of shapes, all mixed together. (I toss a handful here and there into soup.)

Five pounds of all-purpose flour, five pounds of whole wheat flour, five pounds of kosher salt, five pounds of long-grain rice.

And five pounds of granulated sugar.