The Perfect Pantry®

Canned black beans (Recipe: vegan black bean and sweet potato stew)

One convenient thing to know about canned black beans:

There's not much difference in the nutritional value of canned black beans and dried beans you cook yourself. The canning process requires long cooking time at a high temperature, which lowers the nutritional value of many canned vegetables, but beans require long cooking time anyway, so they hold most of their goodness through the canning process. The ultimate convenience food, canned black beans keep for years in the pantry, ready and waiting to turn themselves into soup or stew or a quick quesadilla filling.

Beer (Recipe: turkey mole chili)

One great thing to know about beer:

Even if you don't drink beer (and I don't), there are good reasons to keep it in your pantry. Beer tenderizes marinades, adds a yeasty puff to batters like tempura, and leaves behind a hops/barley/malt flavor in stews after most of the alcohol cooks out, much lighter and less sweet than the residual flavor of wine. If you're lucky and have friends who bring their own six-packs to dinner, leaving the unconsumed bottles behind (out of generosity or forgetfulness), you can use whatever they leave -- regular beer or ale or lager, nonalcoholic beer or "near beer" -- in most recipes, except when you're baking.

Coconut milk (Recipe: moqueca/Brazilian fish stew)

Week in, week out, twice as many people search The Perfect Pantry for information about coconut milk than for any other ingredient.

So I have to ask:

What are you making with coconut milk?

For years I avoided it, believing all I'd read about coconut milk's high fat, saturated fat and calorie content. All true, but it's also high in lauric acid, which has anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties (it's the acid found in breast milk), and most important, it's rich in flavor.

Top 12 cold weather tagines, stews and chili from the pantry

 

Daylight Savings Time -- the wacky way politicians try to restore the natural universe and accommodate the schedule of school buses everywhere -- begins again on March 14, but here in New England, that doesn't mean Spring weather is just around the corner.

Some of our most famous  and well-named weather events arrived in March. The Great Blizzard of 1888, a bit before my time, still holds the record for amount of snow.

My husband Ted and I remember the Storm of the Century (which we called the No-Name Hurricane) in 1993, because days later we found a friend's rather large sailboat that had been lifted by the wind and deposited on the patio of a house a mile away. In 1997, the April Fool's Day Blizzard, which really began the night before, on March 31, seemed to catch the entire city of Boston by surprise.

Now we plan ahead. We stock the house with milk and eggs, coffee and chocolate, and all kinds of fixings that we can turn into stews, tagines and chili.

When the next storm arrives, I'm going to cook some of my favorite dishes that rely on ingredients from the pantry. There's nothing like a bit of warm stew after a bout of shoveling snow.