The Perfect Pantry

How my father learned to cook (Recipe: traditional spaghetti gravy)

Guest post and photos by Sarah in Boston.

When my mother passed away, two days before their anniversary, she and my dad had been married almost 15 years.

While I doubt he ever got over the shock, my dad stepped into the role of single parent and, all things considered, he did a pretty good job. As we moved through those first weeks, one thing that became apparent was that he didn’t really know how to feed two growing daughters. His ideal pantry consisted of dried Great Northern beans, rosemary, sage, bay leaf, table salt, rock salt, pepper, onions, chicken broth and elbow macaroni.

After the funeral my maternal grandmother offered to stay on for a couple of weeks to help him design a week’s worth of recipes. They’d work with what he knew and incorporate some of what she called her "tricks". I can still see them sitting across the table from each other, supposedly talking about food, eating hot pickled peppers, the tears running down their cheeks, laughing and goading each other like kids trying to see who could eat the most.

Panko (Recipe: panko and mustard crusted fish)

Before our first visit to Japan, in 1986, Ted and I tried to memorize one hundred words we thought we'd need -- please and thank you, taxi, toilet, bank, subway, where, how much.

Shrimp (ebi) and train station (eki), both on our list of necessary words, were so similar that it was inevitable we'd confuse the two.

When it happened, when we were sitting in a cafe near the mountain town of Nikko, when we ordered soup noodles with a train station on top, it was funny. More so because, as I recall, the cafe actually was in a train station.

The bowl of soup noodles arrived, topped with a shrimp (yes, victory!) coated with panko, and the first bite of the light, crispy crustacean wiped away all of our embarrassment at asking for a train station in our soup.

Chickpea flour (Recipe: salmon tikka)

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

Linguine, spaghetti (Recipe: pasta with clams and vegetable sauce)

A favorite post from the archives, updated with a new recipe, photos and links. 

One noodle, two noodles, red noodles, blue noodles.

Red sun-dried tomato ravioli. Blue curacao linguine from Giacomo Rizzo, our favorite pasta shop in Venice. Pasta shaped like sombreros, ear lobes, wagon wheels, stars, and corkscrews.

And the "long and stringies": linguine, capellini, fedelini, vermicelli, bucatini, spaghetti, spaghettini, spaghettoni.

Roll the names around on your tongue. You can almost taste the pasta.

Wine you'd be happy to drink, and a cookbook giveaway (Recipe: Grandma's beef brisket in the slow cooker)

Question: Why should you cook with wine you'd be happy to drink?

Answer: So you can drink the leftover wine!

That's a good reason -- a great reason -- but it's not the only reason.

Carnaroli/arborio rice (Recipe: three mushroom risotto)

My grandmother called her refrigerator "the frigidaire", and tissues "kleenex".

Though both were brand names, she meant them in the lower-case sense. The brand became the generic.

I can't remember when I first saw a package of "risotto" in the supermarket, but I remember groaning. When did carnaroli and arborio rice lose their identities to the generic?

Brazil food: manioc, mandioca, cassava (Recipe: farofa with liver and onions)

The third in an occasional series of posts over the next few weeks about Brazilian food and ingredients we discovered during our visit.

On a day filled with magical experiences in the village of São Gonçalo do Rio das Pedras -- a second unsuccessful attempt to meet a cheese maker followed by a visit to Karine, who blessed us with sprigs of rue and incantations to help remove what was starting to seem like a "cheese curse", and a tour of Cynthia's multicultural organic garden -- we had the most magical experience of all in Lurdes' back yard.

In São Gonçalo, if you buy farinha de mandioca (and everyone does), you know Lurdes.

By any definition, she is an artisan, the third generation of women in her family to turn manioc (also known as mandioca or cassava or yucca or yuca) into farinha, used as both ingredient and condiment in Brazilian cooking.

Tortillas (Recipe: shrimp and avocado quesadillas)

Down the hill from the house where Ted's aunt and uncle live, in Ajijic on the shore of Lake Chapala, a small tortilleria opens in mid-morning, six days a week.

When you hear the slap-slap-slap of the masa dough between the palms of the women's hands, and when the aroma of corn toasting on the comal (griddle) works its way up the road, you know the shop has opened.

A dozen tortillas costs very little, just a dollar or two, and a meal would be unthinkable without them. Tortillas -- the round, thin, flatbread made from corn or flour -- are the sandwich bread of Mexico. They're the sandwich bread of The Perfect Pantry, too.

Long grain white rice (Recipe: chicken and shrimp jambalaya)

Who will be the next Chef de Riz?

If you love rice, and you love to cook, and you get yourself to Crowley, Louisiana, in October, you could be crowned Chef de Riz at the 73rd Annual International Rice Festival.

To earn the title, you'll have to wow the judges with a dish that includes at least one cup of cooked rice, and the rice of choice in South Louisiana is long grain white rice.

Fish sauce (Recipe: Thai beef salad)

You watched it, didn't you? The finale of The Next Food Network Star?

Somewhat predictably, the judges selected the mother-of-four whose show could have broad appeal in these challenging economic times. But I was pulling for the other guy, the one who didn't win, the one Alton Brown dubbed The Ingredient Smuggler.

The one most likely to do an entire episode about salty, smelly, absolutely indispensable fish sauce.