The Perfect Pantry®

Slow cooker recipe for lemon-garlic chicken and white bean stew

While it's true that Rival invented the Crock-Pot®, back in 1971, the company didn't invent slow cooking. Clay pots, tagines and Dutch ovens all predate the electric slow cooker. This chicken and white bean stew springs from the French farmhouse tradition of slow cooking in a pot set into the fireplace. Today, thanks to an inexpensive piece of kitchen equipment (the slow cooker I used for this recipe cost less than $20), I can make stew without hauling in wood, building a fire, raking the embers, and lugging a heavy cast-iron Dutch oven from the kitchen to set into the hearth. Lemon and garlic create the flavor base for this healthy, naturally gluten-free stew, which, like most stews, tastes even better the second day.

Brown rice and almond pilaf recipe

Some people make fluffy, puffy, splendiferously perfect rice. I don't seem to have the gene for it. Whenever I attempt stove-top rice, I underboil, overflow the pot, or just, somehow, end up with very blah rice. My life changed forever when I bought my first rice cooker, a $19 model I found at an Asian grocery store. Since then, I've upgraded several times; my current cooker, a three-cup Microcom, makes the best rice (brown, white, jasmine, basmati, whatever you feed it), and it sings a little song when the rice is cooked. I've branched out a bit, too, and used the rice cooker to make quinoa, barley and oatmeal. This recipe for brown rice and almond pilaf, made in the rice cooker, combines typically bland brown rice with sweet caramelized onions, garlic, and toasted almonds. The rice on the bottom of the cooker develops a bit of a brown crust which, when mixed back into the rice, gives the texture of a paella. If you have a richly-flavored vegetable broth in the pantry, swap that for chicken broth to make this a vegan side dish.

Market to Pantry #26: Spice Market and Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, Turkey

From Nathan, in Seattle:

In November 2009 I visited Turkey on a scouting trip for a guided tour of Biblical sites. I was impressed with the beauty, the people, and not least of all the food. We had a couple of days at the end of the trip to visit Istanbul and it blew my mind. There were a few highlights, including the Basillica Cistern and the Hagia Sophia, but the Grand Bazaar and Spice Market proved to be the kind of places where I wish I’d had much more time to explore.

New from the archives: three fresh posts (Recipes: Burmese dry chicken curry, aggression cookies, spicy peanut noodles)

Keeping my promise to update posts from the first two years of The Perfect Pantry, before I photographed the food I cooked, Kathy and I recently recreated three dishes that have one thing in common: they've fallen out of regular rotation in my kitchen and I can't imagine why. I've also updated the links in these posts, which feature powdered ginger, pepper and baking soda.