A sneaky peak inside my pantry cupboard
Come and snoop in my cupboards and see some of my best-loved ingredients, and what I'm cooking this week, plus a mega reader discount for Bold Beans
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Shortly after spending a lot of precious time, money and energy designing and building my dream walk in pantry in our new build flat in London, (which I worked on with the amazing Dering Studio), Covid hit and - I’m paraphrasing a bit here - we moved to the seaside. I’ll write in more detail about this huge move, lifestyle change and the whys and hows of it in another post, but we ended up buying the Victorian terrace house we’re in now - and downgrading our kitchen space significantly. Has anyone else found themselves completing a dream house project and then moving soon afterwards? I feel like this happens more than you might think.
Where our previous kitchen had been an open plan kitchen diner with a utility room-cum-pantry leading off it, our new kitchen was a long, narrow galley with room for no such a thing. Of course I miss the space, storage and luxury of the old pantry (I know, boo hoo for me), but moving is, at least in my experience, usually about compromise, and where we’d lost a fancy walk in pantry - something which always felt to me like some unachievable dream as a cookery writer - we’d gained a wild and wonderful garden with actual trees: a fruiting fig tree, and a cherry blossom sporting fluffy pink pom poms. And then there was the small matter of being minutes from this…
When we embarked on our full kitchen renovation, which again, I’ll be writing about in more detail for paid subscribers, I knew I needed to plan for maximising our kitchen storage, and so I commissioned kitchen cupboards running down nearly the full length of one side of the kitchen, culminating in a tall, ceiling-to-floor pantry cupboard at one end, which is now where I keep the bulk of my pantry ingredients.
While I try to keep some semblance of order in terms of the ‘themes’ of the different shelves (I promise it makes sense to me), the set up now isn’t really comparable to the super organised, precisely decanted, labelled and neatly stacked pantry system I had going on in London, because - spoiler alert - we had a baby and all those spare time shenanigans we had as child free people flew out the window. I’m pretty sure though, that while lots of you reading this might aspire to have a colour coded, beautifully ordered pantry arrangement, my current situation is relatable. I do hope that one day I might find the time and energy for another proper pantry project, but for now, what I have going on does what it needs to - it provides one cool, dark, dry place in which to store the precious swag that works so hard to elevate my cookery.
So I thought it might be fun to fling open the doors and give you a quick glimpse inside the Tardis-like cupboard, and share the organised chaos that lays the foundations for so much of my cooking. You’ll be able to spot from the pictures what some of my staples are, but I’m also going to highlight five of my current favourites, and let you know what I tend to do with them, so that you might be inspired, and also to familiarise you with the sorts of things it’s handy to have by you for cooking from my recipes. Hopefully I may even remind you of a few things you might have lurking in your own cupboards and what deliciousness they can be used for. Hit me up in the comments with your own pantry favourites, it would be lovely to get a sense of the things you can’t live without. If this proves popular, we could make it a regular thing!
Whole Earth Crunchy Organic peanut butter: I love the texture of the crunchy bits which give way to a silky smooth mouthfeel. It’s organic, with no added sugar, which means it’s brilliant for feeding our toddler. I use it for quick fixes when my daughter is super hungry, slathered onto bread, veg or mixed into noodles with tenderstem broccoli for her, as well as us. It makes for a really good satay sauce, too. I also really enjoy Pip and Nut’s Ultimate, deep roast peanut butter for spreading on my toast - they take the roasting of the peanuts quite far and it’s got the perfect level of salt which makes it incredibly moreish!
Belazu’s Cracked Freekeh - Have you ever cooked freekeh? If not, I’d nudge you to get some in. Freekeh, which is used widely in Levantine and North African cooking, is a wonderfully toothsome toasted grain with a gorgeously nutty flavour, and it’s unique in as much as it’s durum wheat harvested while still young and green. The grains are then burned over an open fire to discard the chaff, revealing the green grains and imbuing them with a smoky flavour. They can be cooked in a similar way to rice or bulgur, making a wonderful base for salads, stuffings and all manner of dishes.
Halen Mon smoked Anglesey sea salt, which is smoked over oak. I was sent this stuff recently with an asparagus mail out, and I haven’t stopped dipping into it for pinches of the fabulously smoky sea salt flakes. They are beautifully delicate, with a powerfully distilled oaky smoky flavour that’s a revelation. I’m going to play around with mixing this into unsalted butter to make a smoked butter, and I’ll definitely be using it for some dry brines and marinates to add a smoky dimension to meats, but it’s also incredible used to finish most veg - I particularly love it with carrots and asparagus, but the possibilities are endless, after all, most things taste better with a little hit of smoke. I’m not normally one for smoke ‘products’, but this is natural and absolutely stunning.
Marmite. And yes, forgive me for showing off the fact I have a personalised jar. When this jar runs out, I might even go as far as to decant new Marmite into it. Because, my pals, if you had told 12-year-old me, clasping squares of squishy white bread sandwiching wisps of the unctuous, savoury spread mixed with a thick layer of butter - as was the mainstay of my lunchbox - that one day I would have my own personal ‘Rosie’ jar, I would have fainted. I grew up on the stuff, and so, indeed, has my daughter so far in her short life, not directly, you understand (it’s a bit salty for the babies) but in as much as I ate toast with butter and Marmite every single morning of my pregnancy because I craved it and it kept the morning sickness at bay. I LOVE IT. Aside from its It’s wonderful mixed into whipped butter and served with freshly baked bread as a snack or nibble, used to flavour cheesy gougeres (a la my recipe in my first cookbook A Lot On Her Plate) and tangled through buttered spaghetti, thank you, Nigella. I prefer to use it with a very light touch, because you don’t need much, but it brings a deep savoury depth to braises, glazes and gravies, too. Especially if you’re making something veggie. Who’s with me!?
Bold Beans I did some filming last week with these guys, and I’ve created some seriously tasty recipes with them, one of which I’ll be sharing on Friday in my forthcoming ‘Something For the Weekend #2’ recipe drop, which we’ve already teased out on social here. I rate Bold Beans as a product so much, and find it to be an absolute hero ingredient for my family throughout the week. This is an impressively smart start up that saw a gap in the market for top quality jarred pulses, and the beans are next level. They are cooked to a special recipe and jarred in Spain, where preserved foods are done right, and they all have a magnificent texture and flavour which stands up really well to cooking, unlike so many canned pulses. My daughter absolutely LOVES them, and we regularly cook her something involving a simple soffritto of onion, garlic, bay and carrot with the beans mixed in, maybe some greens wilted through and a spoonful of cream or yoghurt to enrich. If you haven’t tried them, I genuinely think they are game-changing, and the kind people at Bold Beans are giving all my Substack readers a 20% off code for any purchases of their ‘Taste The Range’ packs. Just enter ROSIE20 at the checkout.
What I’m Cooking This Week
Spring risotto is calling me
I wrote this veg-packed risotto recipe for a recent issue of Olive magazine and I love it. It makes for a special, celebratory seasonal family meal. You make a little well in the warm rice and drop in an egg yolk, which gets stirred through with the tender spring vegetables to enrich the whole lot with its yellow silk.
Asparagus orzo and gingered broth
A verdant, sprightly green broth filled with new season asparagus and fresh herbs.
New season asparagus with spiced butter and brown shrimp
Once I’m done with eating the new season spears just simply boiled and dragged through softened butter, this is what I move on to. Use little Atlantic prawns if brown shrimp prove too elusive/expensive.
Something with Jersey royal potatoes
Which are now in season. They are my very favourite spud - so British readers should keep an eye out in all the shops. They have a very special creamy, mineral flavour and pearly flesh, and I’ll be boiling them up with a sprig of mint and slathering them in salted butter initially, then there will probably be potato pizza…
Marmite! A tiny pot of this mercurial wonder is the first thing to go in the suitcase when we have a fly and flop holiday. I’m very envious of that personalised jar mind…….
We’re in the process of designing a new kitchen. In fact a new house. Even with that I think there’ll be compromise. The cost of building here has gone up drastically. But the walk in pantry with wine storage (we’re in Margaret River) is something I’ll fight tough and nail for. It will be heaven. The house we’ve been in for eight years sometimes feels like that film, Mousehunt. Let’s just say peanut butter (smooth) is great for baiting traps! And dare I say after 10 years down under I’ve flipped from Marmite to Vegemite.