The Perfect Pantry®

Recipe for red cabbage salad with walnuts, raisins, feta, and warm mustard dressing

Offer me a dish of cooked cabbage, and I'll likely wrinkle my nose and whisper a quiet oh-please-no. Some foods I love in their raw state -- carrots, berries, and cabbage, among others -- but not when they're cooked. Maybe it's a texture thing. This red cabbage salad falls somewhere in between raw and cooked. The tangy warm mustard dressing wilts the cabbage just enough to satisfy those who prefer cooked vegetables, while retaining a bit of crunch, too. Add raisins for sweet, and feta for salty, and you have the perfect combination to tease all of the corners of your taste buds. Serve this as a side dish with roast chicken, or rolled up with grilled fish or beef in a taco.

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.

Recipe for bok choy stir-fry with ginger and garlic

When I'm lucky enough to get to an Asian market (the closest is nearly 20 miles away), I steer my cart right to the produce aisles to stock up on things the grocery store in my village doesn't carry: choy sum, lemongrass, fresh bean sprouts, and my favorite baby bok choy, a miniature Chinese cabbage. You can make this stir-fry with grown-up bok choy, by trimming the head through the root into smaller wedges, but if you can find the babies, you'll love the sweeter flavor and more delicate texture. Choose heads with either white or a pale green stalks; the taste is the same, so buy whichever color coordinates with the rest of your dinner. This recipe utilizes one of my lazy-girl techniques for wok cooking: pan steaming, the same method used to make potstickers. Rather than blanching the bok choy in a separate pot, I stir-fry in the wok, then toss in a small amount of water and slap a lid on to catch the steam. The tender baby bok choy heads cook quickly this way, while absorbing the flavors of the sauce -- and I only have to wash one pan.

Recipe for oven-roasted carrots

True confession: I don't love cooked carrots. I like them raw, crunchy, dipped into something like hummus or ranch dressing. Cooked carrots don't float my boat. Post-Thanksgiving I discovered an unopened two-pound bag wedged in the back of my refrigerator. I thought about sending those carrots straight to the compost pile, but instead I decided to try cooking them the way I cook potatoes: tossed in a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper, and roasted until their natural sweetness came to the surface and formed a little bit of a crust. Know what? It worked! Call them carrot home fries, if that makes sense: soft on the inside, crusty on the outside, with just enough salt. These oven-roasted carrots are truly the best cooked carrots I've ever tasted.