The Perfect Pantry

Sherry vinegar (Recipe: bread salad with roasted tomato vinaigrette)

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

Frozen puff pastry (Recipe: asparagus and cheese tart)

I'm having fun updating some favorite posts from the archives, like this one, from the days when I didn't photograph the food I cooked. If you missed these posts the first time around, please enjoy them now. With photos and new links, too.

Pâte feuilletée.

POT FEH-YOU-TAY.

Just the thought of making something with such an elegant name scares the bedoodles out of me. If I hadn't watched Julia Child on television, smearing the butter and folding and turning and folding and turning again, making it all seem so utterly doable, I never would have tried to make puff pastry from scratch.

I did make it.

One time.

Then I discovered frozen puff pastry. Someone else does the smearing and folding and turning for you. Imagine that! Puff pastry any time, without devoting an entire day to making it.

Soba/buckwheat noodles (Recipe: asparagus, pepper and peanut soba)

A favorite story from the archives, updated with new recipe, photos and links.

So there we were -- Ted, his sister Jill, Cousin Martin and me -- huddled in the kitchen in my friend Rika's house, in the tiny village of Mihama on the west coast of Japan, in the middle of winter, drinking sake to stay warm, and learning how to make soba noodles.

It was our second visit to Japan, February 1997, windy and snowing, cold beyond cold. We had come to Mihama after a couple of weeks of traveling in Vietnam, where it was hot beyond hot, and our bodies were having adjustment issues.

Rika's house sits right on the beach; except for the kitchen, the rooms are heated only by space heaters, so even without the promise of a cooking lesson, we'd still have gravitated towards the only room that had both heat and food.

Black olives (Recipe: goat cheese and olive stuffed peppers)

My friend Bob, tagine-maker extraordinaire and photography guru, has many good qualities, and one flaw.

He doesn't eat olives.

On a scale of one to ten, where not eating chocolate would be a ten, this ranks as a seven or eight.

My son-in-law Nick doesn't eat canned black olives, but eats all other olives -- a four or five on my scale.

I've never met an olive I didn't want to take home, but canned black olives have a permanent place in my pantry.

Anise seed (Recipe: beet and fennel salad)

When I first moved to Rhode Island, and was still learning the ropes, I asked a teenager working in the produce department in our town's grocery store if he had any fennel.

"What's that?" he replied, with the blankest of blank stares.

"Fennel," I tried again. "It's a vegetable, looks kind of like bok choy, with green stalks on top..."

Another customer came to my aid. "Oh," she explained to the grocery kid, "she means anise."

Anise. That's the way it is, here. Fennel is anise.

So I wondered: if fennel is anise, is fennel seed the same as anise seed?

Garlic (Recipe: oven-baked tortilla española)

Adapted in part from the archives, with new photos, links, and a favorite tapas recipe.

Where will you be on July 24, 2009?

I'll be in Chicago with 1,000 bloggers at the BlogHer annual conference.

More than 100,000 people, perhaps including a blogger or two, will be in Gilroy, California, at the world's most famous garlic festival.

As interesting as it is, BlogHer's agenda can't compete with the Great Garlic Cook-off, the Miss Gilroy Garlic Festival parade, and hundreds of food vendors offering their specialties in honor of the "stinking rose".

Which, by the way, is not a rose at all; it's a lily.

Raisins (Recipe: spinach, golden raisin and parmesan tart)

 

Guest post and photos by Peter in Brazil, chef and co-owner of Pousada do Capão

Raisins were an integral ingredient in my New England culinary upbringing. The California Sun Maid was a pantry icon, on a par with the original 1950’s versions of Vermont Maid, Betty Crocker, the Campbell's twins, Uncle Ben, and Aunt Jemima before their numerous plastic surgeries.

The brown bread that accompanied our favorite hot dogs and beans on Saturday night (i.e., bath night) had to have raisins. My father always threw a handful into the breakfast cream of wheat. Hermits weren’t hermits unless studded with those plump, sweet beauties. And nothing was better than snacking right from the box.

In my innocence, though, I knew nothing of the exotic pleasures of golden raisins.

Canola oil (Recipe: potatoes with aioli dressing)

In the kitchen where I grew up, oil was oil.

Not flax seed, safflower, truffle or rice bran.

Not virgin, and certainly not extra virgin.

Oil was vegetable oil, a healthier alternative to the traditional chicken fat, and a pareve (neither milk nor meat) staple, in my grandmother's kosher kitchen.

And canola oil?

Hadn't even been invented yet.

Kosher salt (Recipe: roasted asparagus with manchego cheese)

Updated from the archives, with new photos, links and recipe.

 

Is kosher salt just another flaky food fashion?

Is it saltier than table salt, better for health or baking or taste?

Is all kosher salt the same?

Is it even kosher?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Dry bread crumbs, and a cookbook giveaway (Recipe: baked cherry tomatoes)

Since the age of seven or so, I've worn eyeglasses.

As a little kid, I hated them, and when I reached high school, I couldn't wait to get contact lenses. But in college, the combination of my night job and early-morning classes made it difficult to pry my eyes open and put the contacts in every morning.

So, reluctantly, I went back to glasses. I had one pair, which began to bore me after a week or so, and I shoved them on my nose every day and never gave them a second thought.

One day, my mother said to me, Glasses are just a fashion accessory. You have more than one jacket, why not more than one pair of glasses?

Aha!

Accessories -- like a colorful scarf or red Birkenstocks, Lego cufflinks or a bug bra -- dress up whatever they're with, and in cooking, that's exactly what dry bread crumbs do.