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.

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?

Tomato sauce (Recipe: Tex-Mex salsa)

While I'm on vacation, please enjoy this post from Kim, a frequent guest blogger here on The Perfect Pantry.

Guest post and photo by Kim in Pasadena, California.

I’m originally from the East Coast, and the most exotic thing I'd eaten before I went into the military back in 1979 was scrapple (that’s one of those “don’t ask, don’t tell" foods).

I had never heard of Southwestern food, never mind Mexican food, so the concept of stuff wrapped in what amounts to a flour or corn pancake was totally outside my understanding. The only thing I’d seen like that was crepes.

My first experience with Mexican food was Taco Bell (no eye rolling allowed). It was quite a wonder for someone coming from a culinary background that had three major types of food: upscale French; cheese steaks/hoagies; and pizza by the slice, topped with cheese and tomato sauce. 

Butter (Recipe: green grapefruit curd)

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

Gifts for food lovers: Books for cooks (Recipe: slow-roasted tomato pesto)

Part Five of an eight-part series.

There are two schools of thought about giving cookbooks to people who love to cook.

Give the classics, the books that last forever.

Or, give the new, the trendy, the books that are hot hot hot right now, the books everyone is talking about, the books laden with photographs, printed on expensive paper, objets for a coffee table, the beautiful, irresistible cookbooks.

Me? I'm from both schools.

Capers (Recipe: roast halibut with orange-caper gremolata)

If you're going to come back in your next life as a jar of capers (though you probably haven't planned on it), you'll want to be picky picky picky.

Make sure you are harvested first thing in the morning, before your bud opens to the sun.

Make sure you are still small, for small (less than one millimeter in size) is more highly prized.

Make sure you are pickled in a brine, or packed in coarse sea salt, but never dried.

Black vinegar (Recipe: peanut dipping sauce)

There's a saying -- a joke -- in my house:

The more you have, the more you buy.

Now, I am not a shopaholic. Really. Oh, occasionally I might go a bit over budget in restaurant supply stores, or a certain favorite used cookbook shop near Fall River, Massachusetts. Or late at night on eBay, when I'm cruising the melamine bowl listings. Or in a shop that sells hand-dyed yarns or Japanese note papers embedded with bits of leaves and gold flecks...

No, in this case, the "you" is me, and the "more" is vinegar. I've had a mental block about it for years. I never remember how much regular distilled vinegar I have in the pantry, or whether I have any of the special ones like champagne or raspberry or seasoned rice or organic cider vinegar hand-pressed somewhere in Canada.

So I buy them all, over and over again, which explains why I have two bottles of black vinegar in my pantry.

Dried peppers (Recipe: savory romesco sauce)

Imagine Laurel without Hardy, Wallace without Gromit, Carrie Bradshaw without Manolo Blahnik.

Unthinkable.

Burgers without buns? Mac without cheese?

Absolutely not.

The Perfect Pantry without dried chile peppers?

Never!

In fact, at this very moment, I have five -- no, six -- uh, seven varieties of dried chiles on hand, not including the peppers in the photo, which went into the recipe below. I've got habañero and the tiny piquin (pronounced pay KEEN), for pure fire. Ancho (smoked poblanos), chipotles (smoked jalapeños) and guajillo, not too hot, for smoky richness. Mulato, dark brown, sweet and a bit fruity, medium hot. Sanaam, small and red, used in Indian cooking (I'm just starting to experiment with these). And, of course, New Mexico red chiles, medium hot and all-purpose.

Almonds (Recipe: Señora Gonzales' chicken with mole colorado)

Though I've been writing The Perfect Pantry for two years, and have adopted two blogs, and managed to figure out (stumbled upon, really) a few truths about what makes a blog work, I'm always surprised when new or would-be bloggers seek my advice.

The key to a successful blog, I tell them, is to keep a sharp focus and stay on topic.

Don't get sidetracked on stories about New Year's Eve in Mexico, I tell them, when you really mean to write about almonds.

Good advice. And yet...

Fish sauce (Recipe: nuoc cham)

All this week, I'm updating posts from the very first month of The Perfect Pantry. New links, new photos, and some great recipes for summer.

When you taste something wonderful in a restaurant, and you ask for the recipe, and the owner himself shares the recipe with you -- and you've written it down, so you won't leave anything out -- you expect to be able to recreate that wonderful taste in your own kitchen.

So why did it take me years to make nuoc cham, the mother condiment of all Vietnamese cuisine, that tastes like it does in a restaurant?

The answer is in the fish sauce, and, as I discovered, all fish sauce is not created equal.