The Kitchen Shelf: Take a few pantry essentials, add two ingredients and make everyday eating extraordinary Hardcover – May 16, 2016

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A beautiful book. A wonderful gift idea for anyone looking to gift a budding chef moving out on their own for the first time. Or a good home economics book for an older teenager who needs to prepare to be an adult one day.The format is intriguing and engaging. Visual and verbal recipes plus directions. All the basics. A very good primer.

Published in 2016 on the Phaidon imprint (home to all of those attractive books you page through at the museum gift shop), the premise is simple: stock your pantry (or, larder, if you prefer) with 30 basic essentials, buy just 2 ingredients from the store, and you can make any of the recipes within the book! Sound familiar? This was the basic plot for last year’s wildly popular ‘Shelf Love’ from Ottolenghi Test Kitchen. The chapters are divided into 10 “key ingredients”, such as a can of chickpeas, bag or rice or carton of eggs. Then, choose among 20 more “shelf essentials” such as garlic, mustard or a tin of anchovies. Next, pick up just 2 items from the grocery store. For instance, cilantro and leg of lamb allows you to create a decadent slow-cooked leg of lamb with Moroccan spices and chickpeas. Or, puff pastry and goat cheese yields a stunning caramelized onion and goat cheese tart. Craving dessert? Buy marshmallows and raspberries for some toasted marshmallow, chocolate and raspberry teacakes! The book’s design is clean and easy to follow - with gorgeous photos throughout. As exciting as it is to feature newly released cookbook titles, we always enjoy discovering one from the past that we were previously unfamiliar with. Here are the dishes we made:• Chicken Satay - Street food in your living room? You bet! The marinade for the chicken also serves double duty as a dipping sauce. It contains lime zest + juice, garlic, soy sauce, turmeric, cumin, chili flakes and peanut butter. Just be sure to dedicate one portion as the marinade and another, separate portion as your dipping sauce. Because food poisoning isn’t desirable. Also, if you are clumsy in the kitchen like I am, wear an apron when mixing the ingredients - unless turmeric-stained clothes are your thing. The rest of the process is smooth sailing. Hit these chicken skewers under the broiler, push ‘Start’ on your rice cooker and mix the reserved dipping sauce with a bit of coconut milk. Boom!• French Toast with Roasted Black Pepper Strawberries - We really embraced the breakfast-for-dinner theme with this book! Here, sweet & juicy strawberries are dusted with a generous amount of cracked black pepper - which adds a perfect kiss of heat. With a prep time of only 10 minutes, this was an easy dish to prepare on a weeknight. Peaches, if in season, would also be a great choice!• Pasta with Mussels, Garlic and Parsley - Until recently, my wife was not a fan of mussels. It was a texture thing. Then, we enjoyed a simply prepared classic French version at a local restaurant and she completely changed her mind. It still came as a bit of a surprise to me when I saw that she selected this recipe to make from the cookbook. This preparation is equally as simple - with only a handful of ingredients (onion, garlic, broth & parsley) and about 15 minutes of prep time. Eating them probably took even less time.• Red Lentil Dhal with Cumin-Roasted Cauliflower and Crispy Leaves - If you’ve been discarding those cauliflower leaves in the past, you are really missing out! This recipe makes full use of these delicious, often neglected parts. The savory dhal features sautéed onions, garlic and toasted spices (cumin seeds, turmeric and chili flakes) - providing the perfect base for the roasted cauliflower. This dish, perhaps more than any other from the book, demonstrates the power of the pantry!• Banana Pancakes with Peanut Butter and Bacon - This is an easy dish to scale, depending on how many mouths you need to feed. Speaking of scales, you won’t be afraid to step on one if you follow our lead: we’ve been using powdered peanut butter instead of the traditional stuff. It contains 90% less fat, is gluten-free and absent of any artificial flavors, colors or preservatives. Game changer! One improvement (at least, in our opinion) we made was to fry the bananas in a skillet with some butter and bourbon before serving. We probably could have enjoyed a bowl of those by themselves! We prefer our bacon thick and are frequently puzzled by the stuff advertised as “thick cut” we see in stores. Thankfully, our local deli knows the meaning of thick and hooks us up. This was another breakfast-for-dinner triumph!

THe concept of this book seemed really interesting. I like to think I have most of what I need to make a meal or dessert or appetizer. HOWEVER, I'd like to find the recipes where I expect them. Not dinner next to cookies and maybe a brunch meal. The chapters (where you'd expect meat, dessert, salads) are chickpeas, rice, can of tomatoes, flour, peanut butter, eggs, coconut milk, chocolate, and milk. I guess the index helps. But this book is WAY more work to FIND a recipe than they'd like you to believe.