The Perfect Pantry

Frozen fruit (Recipe: pink yink ink drink)

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 Two.

In our neck of the woods, berry season lasts for six or eight weeks a year.

Even if you don't have your own strawberry fields or raspberry brambles, you know when it's berry time, because PYO (pick your own) or U-Pik signs appear on electrical poles all over town.

For the other forty-four weeks of the year, our best option is frozen fruit.

I'd never choose frozen fruit over in-season ripe fresh fruit, but individually quick frozen (IQF) fruits, prepared commercially or in your own kitchen, frozen at the peak of ripeness, retain almost all of their nutrient value. IQF fruit is 100% natural, with no added sugar or preservatives. It's trimmed and washed, and economical to use. Take what you need, and leave the rest in the freezer.

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.

Guava paste (Recipe: guava souffle with custard sauce)

Guest post and photos by Peter in Brazil, chef and co-owner of Pousada do Capão

In any small town here in Minas Gerais, there is plenty of animated discussion around who makes the best goiabada, or guava paste.

Here in São Gonçalo, Dona Geralda wins my vote. Her alchemy turns humble guavas and sugar into red gold -– stirring, stirring, patiently stirring over the fire. My absolute favorite is goiabada cascão, guava paste with toothsome chunks of the slow-cooked candied peel suspended throughout. I always have a nice big hunk in my pantry.

Pineapple (Recipe: Love in pieces)

Guest post and photos by Peter in Brazil, chef and co-owner of Pousada do Capão

Back in Rhode Island, whenever I could afford it (when Dole ran a Maui Gold supermarket special), I would stand in the produce aisle and carefully smell, pull the leaves from, and gently press my thumbs into dozens of fresh pineapples, until I found the perfect one.

I would nurse that perfect pineapple to full ripeness over the next week or so. Then, my daughters and I, in a rare and special ritual, would sit around a bowl of freshly cut pineapple chunks and savor each golden morsel, each juicy bite.

Like many Northerners, I had been brainwashed to associate pineapple with Hawaii, colonial New England hospitality, Cantonese cocktails, and the archway on Federal Hill in Providence (I know it’s a pine cone on that arch over Atwells Avenue, but it’s amazing how many people think it’s a pineapple.).

Forgive me, Carmen Miranda.

Brown sugar (Recipe: mulled cider)

If you've been reading The Perfect Pantry for a while, you know a lot about me.

You know that I live in Rhode Island, in a log house in the woods, with a nice kitchen and an herb garden and a fire pit outside.

You know that I love Asian noodles and coffee and that stuff that isn't really mayonnaise.

You know that I am old... old enough to think of this whenever someone says brown sugar...

Dried fruit (Recipe: sweet potato, lentil and raisin stew)

For a short time during high school, I was an addict.

A fruit leather addict.

An apricot fruit leather addict.

After tennis practice, on my way home from school, I'd dig into my backpack and pull out a roll. Every bite tickled the back of my mouth, and I couldn't get enough of it.

My addiction to apricot leather lasted only a few months, but I loved -- and still love -- almost every type of dried fruit, and I always have raisins, craisins (Ocean Spray's clever name for dried cranberries), dried cherries, prunes, figs and apricots in The Perfect Pantry.

Whole wheat flour (Recipe: apple spice cake)

When Ted and I moved to Boston thirty years ago, we discovered a health food store called Erewhon.

Erewhon.

Nowhere, spelled backwards.

Nowhere -- oops, Erewhon -- sat north of Harvard Square, in a part of Cambridge that could have been called Hippie Central, with a tea and incense shop a block away, and stores that sold old oak furniture and long granny dresses.

We lived in Boston, but made the trip across the river to Erewhon for earthy foods sold out of bins, things like nuts and beans and whole wheat flour.

Vanilla bean (Recipe: pears poached in vanilla)

When I was an easily-bored teenager (is there any other kind?), my friends and I called everything that bored us vanilla.

"Oh, that's soooo vanilla" described anything from physics homework to piano lessons, to a hair style or lipstick color or having to babysit on a Saturday night.

And what did we call people who bored us, the math teacher with the monotone voice, the boy who had a reputation as a bad kisser?

Vanilla beans.

We were so unkind. Vanilla deserved better.

Agave nectar (Recipe: grilled peaches with balsamic and granola)

A year ago, when I first started using agave nectar, I'd mention it in my cooking classes and be met with the dreaded uuhhh.

(Actually I can't even spell the sound a kitchen full of puzzled cooks makes. Something more gutteral, more visceral, more eeewww. The sound you hear when people watch a horror movie and a creature crawls out of a lagoon. Often accompanied by a no-please-no-not-me waving of the hands.)

Ah-GAAAHHHH-vay?

What is thaaaaaaat?

You'd think I'd proposed cooking with innards, or Pepto Bismol, or eye of newt.

Maybe I should have told my students that tequila comes from the same plant.

Lavender, and a purple haze (Recipe: pork tenderloin with lavender grilled peaches)

Please welcome Marcia, who with this post joins The Perfect Pantry as guest blogger. She lives up the road from me, in a lovely old house with several vegetable and flower gardens, surrounded by acres of woodland. Professionally, she's been a teacher, children's librarian, naturalist and goat farmer. An avid cook and baker, Marcia will share stories and recipes once a month or so.

Guest post and photos by Marcia in Rhode Island

Lavender is a frivolous yet ever-present staple in my pantry. Occasionally my garden yields a few tablespoons, just enough for lavender madeleines when I’m feeling peckish and reminiscent, but most of the time, I buy buds and flowers embalmed in plastic packets.   

Until today.
   
“Pick your own lavender and distill the color of our garden into your kitchen,” promised the ad that ran in our local paper a couple of weeks ago.

And I’d been waiting. Because I am sure you don’t pick lavender on just any day.

If you’ve read Beyond the Paw-Paw Trees, then you know that something unusual always happens when the sky is lavender blue. This morning the early light shifted from gold to lavender-ish. At last! I gathered up basket and scissors, and drove through the rolling farmlands of eastern Connecticut.