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.

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.

Low-carb pasta (Recipe: Broccoli, basil and pasta salad)

Adapted in part from an archived post, with new photos, links and printer-friendly recipe.

Over the past few years, as more and more companies have jumped on the low-carbohydrate bandwagon, I've tasted some pretty dreadful products masquerading as healthy-and-delicious, so when Dreamfields low-carb pasta actually passed both the taste and texture tests, I gleefully stocked The Perfect Pantry's shelves.

Made from durum semolina flour, with no soy or substitutes, Dreamfields has all the good flavor of regular pasta. When cooked to the al dente stage, it's actually firm to the bite, with what chefs call "good mouth feel." And with just five grams of digestible carbohydrate per two-ounce serving, it's low low low on the glycemic index -- a boon to diabetics, South Beach dieters, and anyone who has to keep an eye on the daily carb count.

How does Dreamfields succeed where other alternative pastas, billed as low-carb or high-fiber or "healthy", have failed?

Dumpling wrappers (Recipe: shrimp potstickers)

Everything tastes better when it's served in a Japanese bento box. Fill each compartment with a different taste and texture, then put the lid on and pack for a picnic, indoors or outside. Welcome to Bento Week, Day One.

I have never, ever, walked out of an Asian market empty-handed.

Even when I manage to convince myself that there's no room in my pantry for more dried rice noodles or jugs of soy sauce, or even for my favorite chili paste with garlic, the cookware aisle draws me in.

And so it is that I am the proud owner of three small wooden rolling pins made specifically for rolling out dumpling wrappers.

Which, by the way, I have never, ever done.

Orzo, and other small pasta (Recipe: cold curried orzo)

Poor orzo.

Compared to the other small, stubby pastas, with lyrical names like ditalini (little thimbles), annelini (little rings), acini de pepe (little beads), tubettini (little tubes), tripolini (little bows) and stelline (little stars), orzo sounds so... well, so pedestrian.

It definitely needs another syllable or two to fit in with the other pastas, but in taste, texture, and versatility, orzo (which means "barley" in Italian) leads the pack.

Soba/buckwheat noodles (Recipe: asparagus, pepper and peanut soba)

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

So there we were -- Ted, his sister Jill, Cousin Martin and me -- huddled in the kitchen in my friend Rika's house, in the tiny village of Mihama on the west coast of Japan, in the middle of winter, drinking sake to stay warm, and learning how to make soba noodles.

It was our second visit to Japan, February 1997, windy and snowing, cold beyond cold. We had come to Mihama after a couple of weeks of traveling in Vietnam, where it was hot beyond hot, and our bodies were having adjustment issues.

Rika's house sits right on the beach; except for the kitchen, the rooms are heated only by space heaters, so even without the promise of a cooking lesson, we'd still have gravitated towards the only room that had both heat and food.

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.

Chinese egg noodles (Recipe: mee goreng/fried noodles)

When Bee invited me to write a guest post for Rasa Malaysia, one of my favorite Asian cooking blogs, I knew I had to tell the tale of my relationship to mee goreng, one of Malaysia's favorite street foods. Please visit Rasa Malaysia for the story and recipe.

There are, I think, two secrets to making great Asian food. One, use a hot hot hot wok. Two, cook with authentic ingredients.

Chinese egg noodles, fresh and dried, are one of the authentic Asian ingredients that have a permanent home in The Perfect Pantry. 

Pine nuts (Recipe: penne with roasted red pepper pesto)

When I look out the window in front of my desk, I see pine trees.

And out the kitchen window? Pine trees.

And from the windows in the living room, bedroom, porch? Pines, pines, pines.

Pine trees everywhere, but not a single pine nut to eat.

How is that possible?

Pad Thai noodles (Recipe: rice noodle salad with shrimp)

Oodles of Noodles Week, Day Two.

There are noodles that tell you what to do with them, and there are noodles that leave much to the imagination.

Pad Thai noodles -- banh pho -- tell you exactly what they want to become.