The Perfect Pantry

Other People's Pantries #94

From Kirsten (From Kirsten's Kitchen to Yours), in Ojai, California:

I moved into a very small apartment, 400 square feet, and with only two cupboards (above the stove no less!) I turned to freestanding items for my pantry.

Harissa (Recipe: Moroccan carrot salad)

An updated post from 2006, with a new recipe, photos and links.

The chile peppers on the can gave it away.

Before I even knew what harissa was, I knew it was hot.

Head-sweating, hair-tingling, tongue-numbing, nose-dripping hot.

And I love hot.

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.

Drop In & Decorate cookies for donation: have fun, do good, make someone's holidays happy

 

“Thank you for the extraordinarily beautiful holiday cookies that you prepared and delivered to the Crossroads Rhode Island Family Center. For the fourth year in a row, your group has brightened the holidays for homeless families who are unable to provide their children with the wonderful treats that make the winter holidays so special and memorable.” Crossroads Rhode Island family emergency shelter, Providence

If you've been reading The Perfect Pantry for a while, you might remember the story about Drop In & Decorate. Way back in 2002, my friend Candy and I read an article, or maybe saw a television show, about Martha Stewart's beautiful flooded-icing cookies. Like Martha herself, the cookies looked elegant. Composed. Perfect.

Candy, an artist, baker, and ever the optimist, said, "We can do that."

Ever the bake-o-phobe, I replied with absolute certainty, "No, we can't."

How we moved from no to yes, from our first attempts at decorating a few batches of cookies in my kitchen to a nonprofit organization about to zoom past the 10,000 cookies donated mark, is a great story, one I've already shared with you.

The idea behind Drop In & Decorate is simple: bake some cookies; gather a group of family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, your worship group or book group to decorate the cookies together; donate the cookies to a nonprofit agency serving basic human needs in your own community.

It’s a simple idea in a complicated world, something anyone can do.

Something you can do.

Other People's Pantries #93

From Julia (Cook.Grow.Eat.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts:

This is the post that will make you really grateful for the kitchen and pantry you have!

Despite my hardest efforts, I am not independently wealthy. So when I bought this house, I had to make compromises -- I opted for the driveway, garden and separate dining room in a great neighborhood as opposed to the large, functional kitchen. I know, I know, I used to be a professional chef, and the kitchen still didn't rank.

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.

Turmeric (Recipe: saag aloo/potatoes with spiced spinach)

In days of old, when nights were cold, I used to spend a lot of time knitting.

Yarn shopping replaced clothes shopping as my favorite activity. I bought yarn wherever I found something out of the ordinary -- at a stall in Covent Garden, at a craft fair in New Zealand with Cousin Martin, at hidden-away sales of Uruguayan yarn in Manhattan --and eventually I took up spinning and dyeing my own yarn.

And that's why, long before I ever used turmeric in my cooking, I had some in my pantry. In the world of natural dyeing, turmeric turns everything it touches a golden yellow color; in cooking, it does the same thing.

Powdered buttermilk (Recipe: pear spice cupcakes)

When you drive toward my town from pretty much anywhere, you pass a mall or two.

Big box stores, little box stores, grocery stores and discount stores. Drive-through doughnuts, drive-up banking. Hardware, software, sportswear.

It's hard to believe that, a century ago, apple orchards and dairy farms, punctuated by occasional clusters of tiny wood-shingled houses along the road, were all you'd find around here. Today, what remains is the name -- Apple Valley -- and just a handful of orchards.

Our house is on the outskirts of Apple Valley, five or ten miles from here to one of those grocery stores, not far to drive in good weather but not fun in the winter. So, at this time of year, I always keep shelf-stable milk and powdered buttermilk in my pantry.

Other People's Pantries #92

From Kalyn (Kalyn's Kitchen), in Salt Lake City, Utah:

It's probably been three years now, but I can still remember my feeling of delight when I first discovered Lydia's blog. Finally, here was a fellow blogger who might be as infatuated with pantry ingredients as I was! Of course Lydia and I are now real-life friends (and still wildly enthusiastic about pantry ingredients.) When I finished my recent house renovations I was lucky enough to gain four new pantries, so how could I pass up a chance to share them with readers of The Perfect Pantry?

Chinese five-spice powder (Recipe: five-spice applesauce)

A favorite post from 2007, updated with a new recipe, photos and links.

Can you name:

The five W's? (who, what, where, when, why)

The five senses? (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste)

The five elements? (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water)

The five flavors? (sour, bitter, sweet, pungent, salty)

The five spices in Chinese five-spice powder?

Er....uh.....um....

Stumped?