A City Kitchen's Pantry

I recently heard a TV chef say that 85% of us never know what we're going to have for dinner until dinnertime.  She offered no proof for this statistic, but from my own anecdotal experience, it rang true.

Across America there's often a fast food restaurant adjacent to the supermarket, tempting a drive-through supper instead of getting out of the car to buy groceries and then go home to cook.  That's because the most time-consuming and challenging part of home cooking is the planning, the shopping and the prepping.  If we had someone do all this for us, we all could make fabulous "30-minute meals."  Absent that, having a pantry is the next best thing.

We city cooks are lucky.  We can easily buy great fresh ingredients -- produce, fish, poultry -- on the way home from work.  We may still be one of those 85% deciding supper at 6:00 p.m. but with a well-stocked pantry, we can be eating a home cooked meal at 7:00 p.m.

What a Pantry Makes Possible

The traditional notion of a pantry is a small room filled with cans, jars, and baskets of root vegetables.  Maybe some home cooks have such a luxury, but most city cooks do not.  For us, a pantry is a concept and not a place.  Besides, our storage capacity may be limited to a single cabinet.

Let's go back to that 6:00 p.m. "what's for dinner" moment.  You could stop at a fish store on the way home from work and buy a pound of already-cleaned shrimp (or instead of spending the money on the more costly pre-cleaned shrimp, buy jumbos because there will be fewer shrimp per serving and thus fewer to clean).  If you then go home to a well-stocked pantry, you'll have a choice on how to cook them.  For example: 

• Clean, peel and dust the shrimp with corn meal to which you've added a pinch of cayenne pepper and do a quick sauté in a non-stick pan with a tiny bit of olive oil, cooking until golden, then place on top of salad greens, or
• Rub with a little spicy harissa and broil 2-minutes a side and serve with quick cooked couscous, or
• Cook in a little olive oil, minced garlic and a pinch of red pepper flakes until the garlic is golden and the shrimp is just opaque, then add a small can of cherry Italian tomatoes and quartered artichoke hearts; simmer 10 minutes to get the raw taste out of the tomatoes and serve with rigatoni. 

You get the point.  A pound of shrimp and three ways to make a quick dinner.  But you could only do this if your pantry already contained cornmeal, cayenne pepper, harissa, couscous, olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, canned tomatoes, rigatoni, and frozen artichoke hearts.

Plan Your Pantry, Don't Just Fill It

I've spent some time looking at my and other city cook pantries and have come up with basic principles for stocking and keeping a hard working city pantry:

• Begin by taking a frank look at how you cook.  If you rarely cook Asian recipes, resist the abundance of Asian ingredients and sauces.  Instead, be candid about how you cook every day and stock for that because pantry goods can spoil, fade in flavor, or just get lost in the clutter, leaving you with more but not better choices.
• Do not buy pantry items too far ahead, nor in too large a quantity.  It can be tempting for us urban control-freaks to never run out of something we consider essential, but if you buy too far in advance, items will lose flavor or even become rancid (olive oil will do this).  Note the pace at which you use things so when you get close to the bottom of a bottle or a jar, that's when to add it to your grocery list.
• If there's an ingredient you won't use often but still want on hand, buy the smallest size. I know it may seem more cost-effective to buy bigger, but if you don't use it often, it will only go bad and where's the cost savings in that? Because most city grocers acknowledge small city households, we can easily find the small sizes and aren't limited to Costco/Sam's Club mega-containers. So if you want the option to spontaneously make a tuna salad every other month, go ahead and buy mayonnaise, but get the 8 oz. jar.
• For anything you won't use often, like spices, write the purchase date on a label or bottom of a jar.  The same goes for writing the date on anything you put in the freezer.  That way you'll know for sure if a pantry item you use infrequently may be past its prime.
• Use your pantry either to combine with fresh ingredients, or else make an entire meal.  In Mark Bittman's very popular "101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less" (The New York Times, July 18, 2007), nearly every single meal depended on pantry items to work.  Such as number 27: "Egg in a hole, glorified:  Tear a hole in a piece of bread and fry in butter.  Crack an egg into the hole.  Deglaze pan with a little sherry vinegar mixed with water, and more butter; pour over egg."  Too extreme?  How about number 33?  "Sauté 10 whole peeled garlic cloves in olive oil. Meanwhile, grate Pecorino, grind lots of black pepper, chop parsley and cook pasta. Toss all together, along with crushed dried chili flakes and salt."  See?  The pantry stuff is essential.
• Keep a small pad of paper in the kitchen so that each time you run out of an essential item, or when a bottle or jar is nearly empty, make a note.  Then the next time you're putting in an order from Fresh Direct or shopping at your favorite market, replace it. 

See our new "Essential Kitchen" section for suggestions for what to keep in a city kitchen pantry and also a refrigerator and freezer pantry.   I've based these lists on my pantry but you should build your own.  Once you do you'll have more control and confidence in the kitchen, and this, in turn, will make you a better and happier city cook. 

It's also how to turn "what's for dinner?" from a chore into an adventure.

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