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When Pantry Cooking Can Be Great

Published March 21, 2022

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The results may surprise you

Much as I love fresh ingredients, this winter I have become even more comfortable cooking from the pantry and the freezer than ever before. Much as I’m looking forward to non-greenhouse, non-root, non-frozen vegetables, I have been cooking with joy.

The other night, I pulled ten tomatoes from the freezer. I cooked them over low heat for four hours with a stick of butter, stirring only when I walked through the kitchen. And I served that – if you want to be fancy – tomato confit, over brown rice. That’s not August, by any means, but it was intense and delicious. Then I took the leftover rice and cooked it with a lot more water, coconut, cinnamon, soy sauce, and raw peanuts; finished with a poached egg, that made me SO happy. (It also made me regretful about all those eggs I’ve eaten in my life with white bread.)

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