The Perfect Pantry

Brazil food: Kitchens and cooktops (Recipe: chicken with ora pro nobis)

The fourth in an occasional series of posts about Brazilian food and ingredients we discovered during our recent visit.

On our first morning at the Pousada do Capão, we drank cashew juice and ate homemade granola and fresh, really fresh, mango and pineapple, and we toasted our own bread-and-cheese sandwiches in a cast iron griddle on a fogão a lenha, the freestanding wood stove that is the heart and soul of every kitchen in Minas Gerais.

For me, owner of a six-burner Viking, this simple stove was love at first sight.

Cider vinegar (Recipe: dried cranberry and pear chutney)

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

Slow-roasted tomatoes (Recipe: corn, bean, and two tomato salad)

With any luck, the next time you see these tomatoes, they'll look like this:

Fresh herbs (Recipe: fava bean salad)

Would you call me a food snob?

I drink Fresca, sing the praises of Miracle Whip, and make a great chicken salad from a boxed rice mix. My pantry harbors no-boil lasagne noodles, curry powder, broccoli slaw and discos -- all convenience foods.

Yet, from April to October, I cook only with fresh herbs, from my summer pantry (also known as my garden), and no other herbs will do.

How to preserve the harvest, even if it comes from the grocery store (Recipe: pear chutney)

Every year in May, Candy and Dave drive down from Boston to help me prepare and plant the herb garden.

Every Monday morning in summer, before sunrise and before my first cup of coffee, I toddle out into the garden in my pajamas and cut handfuls of herbs. After I wrap the cuttings in damp paper towels, Ted delivers them to Boston in what we've come to call our very own "herb CSA."

Every September, Candy and Dave return to harvest, cook, dry and freeze the fruits (and herbs) of our summer garden into pantry items we use all winter.

This year, on harvest day, we put up two types of pesto, mint jalapeño syrup -- and the hottest chutney this side of anywhere.

Garlic (Recipe: pear and parsnip soup)

Here in Rhode Island, people don't always know what to do with the letter R.

It pops up where it shouldn't: Coventry becomes "Carventry," Lydia becomes "Lydier."

And it's missing from at least one fundamental pantry ingredient: garlic, which the locals call gah-lick.

Fortunately, it's only the R that's missing, and not the garlic itself. Rhode Island is justly famous for Italian-American cuisine, with no skimping on the garlic. Two farms within a few miles of my house offer unusual and heirloom varieties, including both softneck (the most common type) and hardneck. In the supermarket, garlic is garlic, anonymous and uniform, but at the farm stands, garlic answers to many names: Rocambole, Spanish Roja, Chesnok Red, Mexican Red Silver.

Parsley (Recipe: tzatziki)

Simon and Garfunkel would feel right at home in my herb garden.

I have it all: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

Can you see them in this photo?

I have lemon thyme and lemongrass, Thai basil and purple basil, chives and garlic chives too, but for some reason, I've never been able to grow dill.

Fresh herbs are an important part of The Perfect Pantry, even though they are only available from the garden for five months of the year. Of the four herbs of song, parsley will be first to go, as night temperatures begin their descent into winter. (Most of the tender basil has bid farewell for the year, though there is a fresh batch of pesto in the freezer.) It's a shame, too, because this year my parsley field produced the most glorious plants, rich in color and flavor, and, for the first time, I began to use my flat-leaf parsley not only as a garnish, but also as a valued ingredient in my cooking.

Fresh herbs, three bricks, one cookbook (Recipe: brick-grilled chicken thighs)

When Sunday morning starts with the ring of the telephone, you know someone, somewhere, is calling to tell you something you don't want to hear.

"I'm sick," my friend Cindy sniffled into the phone.

A summer cold, the kind that works its way through your entire body and makes you feel like jello, had taken hold, so we had to let go of our plan to spend last Sunday evening cooking together.

A few weeks ago, when Ivonne of Cream Puffs in Venice and Cath of A Blithe Palate invited me to join other bloggers and cook from Faith Heller Willinger's new book, Adventures of an Italian Food Lover: with recipes from 254 of my very best friends, I knew instantly which Italian food lover I'd invite to dinner. I called Cindy, not because she is my most Italian friend (she is), or because she is a professional food stylist (she is), or because she is a certified executive pastry chef (she is). And not because we have gone on several food adventures together, to an Asian supermarket in Boston and to farm stands closer to home (we have), and not even because she runs highly entertaining "insider" walking tours of Providence's Federal Hill, the most Italian neighborhood in Rhode Island (she does).

I wanted to cook for Cindy, and her husband Ken, because she makes friends wherever she goes. She knows the man who sells her pasta and proscuitto, the woman who grows giant zucchini blossoms, the ladies who bake the best pastries, and the neighbor who grows grapes in his backyard vineyard and makes wine in the garage. Food shopping, to her, is a person-to-person experience, and that is the premise of Ms. Willinger's book, too.

Choosing a menu was easy.