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.

Aphrodisiacs in the Pantry (Recipe: beef stew)

Two years ago, in February, I discovered bookworms in my pantry.

This year, the pantry is filled with aphrodisiac foods.

What's a girl to do when she finds foods of love hiding on her spice rack, in the cupboards, even in the fridge and freezer? 

Grains of paradise, a Pantry Special (Recipe: tagine of lamb with apricots)

Pantry Specials are great ingredients that find their way into my pantry from time to time, but not all the time. In this occasional series of short posts, you'll find information and recipes for foods that might not be on your local supermarket's shelves, but are available online.

On a recent search for new pantry ingredients with food blogging friend TW Barritt of Culinary Types, I acquired this tin of grains of paradise -- so unfamiliar to me that I had to look it up on my phone in the middle of the store.

Popular in West African cuisine and indigenous to that part of the world, grains of paradise (also called Melegueta or alligator pepper) got its name in a medieval marketing ploy: spice traders looking for a way to inflate the price claimed that the seeds grew only in Eden, and had to be collected as they floated down the rivers out of paradise. Spices were popular in those days, but true pepper was expensive; grains of paradise was a cheaper substitute (ironically, today pepper is inexpensive, while grains of paradise is not cheap at all). The spice was widely used in England until King George III, fearing it was being used in beer and wine production, banned it.

Grains of paradise tastes pungent and fruity, a bit like pepper crossed with cardamom. A frequent component of the spice blend ras el hanout, it works well with eggplant, potatoes, lamb and poultry, squash, tomatoes, and other root vegetables. Purchased in seed form, it must be ground or crushed right before use, and is best added towards the end of the cooking time.

Is this Pantry Special new to you?

Juniper berries (Recipe: lamb stew)

Guest post and photos by Marcia in Rhode Island.

Every family has one. A non-conformist.

In the pine family, juniper is the rebel. Unlike its cousin, the slender and erect red cedar, juniper spreads low to the ground, sloppily, in all directions. Another cousin, white pine, can be lumbered, while juniper is almost impossible to uproot. And a third cousin, hemlock, has feathery soft needles; juniper’s are nasty, vicious little things.

Most of the pine cousins have woody cones that send seeds flying into the wind; the fruits start off as a cluster of fleshy scale, and when they dry out, they look like the familiar pine cones.

Juniper holds its cones tightly on the branches; the scales stay fleshy and look like berries, but they’re not. What we call juniper berries are actually soft purplish “pine cones”.

Dried fruit (Recipe: sweet potato, lentil and raisin stew)

For a short time during high school, I was an addict.

A fruit leather addict.

An apricot fruit leather addict.

After tennis practice, on my way home from school, I'd dig into my backpack and pull out a roll. Every bite tickled the back of my mouth, and I couldn't get enough of it.

My addiction to apricot leather lasted only a few months, but I loved -- and still love -- almost every type of dried fruit, and I always have raisins, craisins (Ocean Spray's clever name for dried cranberries), dried cherries, prunes, figs and apricots in The Perfect Pantry.

Red curry paste (Recipe: mussel stew)

Sometimes it takes a waiter with attitude to remind me of the value of a great pantry.

Last month, while visiting San Francisco, Ted and I and two of my favorite blogging friends went to dinner at the Fog City Diner, which has been a fixture on the dining scene since 1985.

We ordered a few different starters; I recall a tuna-avocado thing, and a nice salad with local greens. Ted chose a curried mussel stew, served with slices of baguette. While the other appetizers were good, the mussel stew was transcendent, and the four of us descended upon it until we'd dunked and devoured all of the bread and had to ask for more to mop up every bit.

When our waiter returned to clear the licked-clean soup bowl, we asked whether the chef would be willing to share the recipe.

Oh, it's not that hard, he replied. I'm sure you can figure it out.

And he walked away.

After a few seconds, we realized that no recipe would be forthcoming, but we agreed that yes, we surely could figure it out.

And so I returned to Rhode Island, to my well-stocked pantry, to extricate a can of coconut milk and my stash of red curry paste, for clearly those were the key ingredients in the mussel stew.

Pimentón/smoked paprika (Recipe: Clean the Freezer Chili)

A week of Spices That Make Your Food Sing. Day One.

By now, Top Chef is old hat.

(Of course you're watching it. We're all watching it. We're hooked. We don't want to be hooked on a reality show, but we are.)

If you've been with Top Chef for a while, you remember Season 2, the season when molecular gastronomy met traditional Spanish cuisine, the season of Sam-who-should-have-won, the season of Marcel vs. Ilan, the season of saffron and pimentón.

Saffron (Recipe: lamb tagine with prunes and apricots)

In numerology, three can be lucky or unlucky.

Bad luck comes in threes, they say, but the third time's a charm.

For saffron, three is an auspicious number -- the number of stigmas, what we recognize as saffron threads, in each crocus flower.

Only three. Which is why it takes more than 70,000 flowers to yield one pound of saffron. Which is why saffron is the most expensive spice in the world.

Dried kidney beans (Recipe: pueblo vegetable stew)

Beans, beans, good for your heart.
The more you eat, the more you... Oops.

Beans, beans, the musical fruit.
The more you eat, the more you toot.

Beans, beans, they'll give you gas.
The more you eat, the more you pass.

Beans, beans. Poor things. Beans have been the subject of some of the world's silliest rhymes.

They'll have the last laugh, though, because beans, one of the world's healthiest foods, pack a nutritional punch that's no joke.

Coconut milk (Recipe: egg curry)

A week about stews, and the good things that come from cans.

Brother bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime
His sister had another one, she paid it for the lime

She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em both up
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em both up
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em both up
Put the lime in the coconut, she called the doctor, woke him up, and said

Doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take, I said
Doctor, to relieve this bellyache, I said...

Oops, don't know the tune? Here goes...

Where I live, neither coconuts nor limes grow on trees (we specialize in pine cones!), but there's always a can of coconut milk in my pantry.