The Perfect Pantry

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

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

Ginger root (Recipe: steamed fish in packets)

One horribly hot and humid day last summer, I visited my friend Julia's tiny urban garden.

I didn't go for the copious quantities of iced coffee that we both love, nor for her especially good egg salad, nor even for the effortless conversation we always enjoy.

No, what I really wanted was to dig ginger.

Julia, a chef and restaurant consultant, stores her ginger in the garden during the summer months. She digs it up when she needs a bit for cooking, breaks off a piece, then plants it back in the garden, where it continues to grow.

In the photo above, that's Julia's hand holding a "hand" of ginger, which has sent out new roots. In the front are three "fingers" of new ginger growth, brighter white than the old part, and with new green shoots coming out the top.

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.)

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."

Feta cheese, and a cookbook giveaway (Recipe: baked shrimp with tomatoes and feta)

When I was younger, I learned a lot of what I knew about boys in summer camp, from my girlfriends who had older siblings or whose mothers had had "the talk" before mine ever worked up the courage to give it a try.

Similarly, I learned a lot of what I knew about food from my friends who had grandparents and parents from Italy and Puerto Rico and the American South. Pasta and parmesan, enchiladas and chicken fried steak -- all were new to me.

I didn't know any kids from Greek families, though, so it took years before I learned about feta cheese.

Frozen puff pastry (Recipe: asparagus and cheese tart)

I'm having fun updating some favorite posts from the archives, like this one, from the days when I didn't photograph the food I cooked. If you missed these posts the first time around, please enjoy them now. With photos and new links, too.

Pâte feuilletée.

POT FEH-YOU-TAY.

Just the thought of making something with such an elegant name scares the bedoodles out of me. If I hadn't watched Julia Child on television, smearing the butter and folding and turning and folding and turning again, making it all seem so utterly doable, I never would have tried to make puff pastry from scratch.

I did make it.

One time.

Then I discovered frozen puff pastry. Someone else does the smearing and folding and turning for you. Imagine that! Puff pastry any time, without devoting an entire day to making it.

Garlic (Recipe: oven-baked tortilla española)

Adapted in part from the archives, with new photos, links, and a favorite tapas recipe.

Where will you be on July 24, 2009?

I'll be in Chicago with 1,000 bloggers at the BlogHer annual conference.

More than 100,000 people, perhaps including a blogger or two, will be in Gilroy, California, at the world's most famous garlic festival.

As interesting as it is, BlogHer's agenda can't compete with the Great Garlic Cook-off, the Miss Gilroy Garlic Festival parade, and hundreds of food vendors offering their specialties in honor of the "stinking rose".

Which, by the way, is not a rose at all; it's a lily.

Syrian spice, a Pantry Special (Recipe: chicken shish kabob)

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. 

Syrian spice, Syrian allspice, Arabic spice, baharat: what's in a name? The basic ingredients in the Syrian version of this popular North African spice blend -- black peppercorns, allspice berries, cinnamon and nutmeg -- can be enhanced with a bit of sumac, cumin, cardamom, cassia or cinnamon, paprika, cloves, rose petals, dried lime, saffron or mint. A rich and peppery (spicy, not hot) mix, Syrian spice makes a delicious rub for grilled chicken, or the base of a flavorful dip for roasted vegetables. My local Middle Eastern market blends its own, letting the pungent, complex flavor of allspice take center stage. I love it.

Ro*Tel (Recipe: Tex-Mex turkey lasagne)

Nothing takes the chill off rainy days in April better than food inspired by the flavors of Mexico. Welcome to Olé Olé Week, Day One.

Back in November 2008, just after the election, I wrote about the heartbreak of living in a country still divided -- not by politics, but by Ro*Tel®.

Yes, I wrote, I live in a blue state.

Blue, as in singing the blues. As in woe-is-us, no Ro*Tel blues.

In my local supermarket, I found a substitute, diced tomatoes with green chiles, made by an Italian foods manufacturer. Not Ro*Tel, but close enough. I bought a couple of cans for the pantry and resigned myself to a life of deprivation.

The following week, as I cruised the aisles in my local grocery store, I spied a pile of cans on the top shelf in the canned vegetable section -- yellow cans jumping out from the sea of red-tomato-colored labels.

Tamarind (Recipe: Mozambique chicken)

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

We lunched at Al Arabe Lebanese Restaurant last week during our routine weekly shopping junket to Diamantina. A cold, tall glass of tart tamarind juice, over ice and lightly sweetened with brown sugar, was just what I needed to take the edge off the noonday heat. And it was the perfect accompaniment to a plate of Ahmed’s meat kibbeh and delicious fatoosh salad.

As we returned to the center of town to finish up a few errands before heading home to São Gonçalo, I couldn’t resist buying some tamarind pods from a street vendor, whose wheelbarrow was brimming with not only tamarind, but also mangoes, okra, araticum, pequi, and other delicacies of the cerrado.

Usually I write about my pantry items that are native to Brazil and were globalized with the help of the Portuguese and Spanish explorers. Tamarind, on the other hand, is native to Africa and subsequently was naturalized all over the tropical world by colonizers and traders.

Its uses run the gamut from dyestuff to laxative to cattle fodder to furniture-making, but today I'll stick to its culinary appeal.