Use-it-Up Month

What August is really good for

beans and leeks and broth and chiles

August is in its full, muggy swing. In the community garden on my block the tomatoes are blooming green to yellow to red, the peppers peek out from demurring leaves, and the cucumbers in my neighbors’ plots are looking particularly tumescent. The peach tree grows heavy. The basil stalks will not shut up. A few mornings a week I go by to water, or if the rains have already done my job, to sit and watch the white butterfly make its rounds, check on the shade of the tomatoes, remember a bit of quiet.

At home, I have begun a different project. In an attempt to curb this month’s grocery budget—and reawaken my own wild kitcheny desires—I have resolved to spend the coming month or two eating through my pantry. My home is lousy with dried beans, with neglected polenta, with frozen pint containers of who-knows-what; I just found out, happily, that one holds a generous serving of congee. Lousy with half-bags of rice cakes and rice paper wrappers and rice noodles, a whole pound of squid ink pasta I received as a gift and still have no idea what to do with. (Spare can of tuna??? Oil and garlic?) Five kinds of lentils. And so on.

This is by no means a problem. A full pantry is a comfort, a defense against unplanned dinners, a springboard for ideation. But it is also inventory. It is an asset. Sometimes we get into a mood to use it.

Eating through the pantry often feels boring: beans and rice for days, pasta for weeks. But I’ve decided that August is the perfect time to do it, to plumb the depths of freezer and fridge and shelves as much as possible, and add life to the whole enterprise with greens and tomatoes and everything else arriving in the CSA bag or garden plot or farmers market trip. I don’t mean to imply that we should all exclusively be procuring our vegetables in the most idyllic of ways; I just mean that in August, we sometimes are. And if you’re going to be, say, buying four pounds of plums on a random Monday, it’s nice to balance that out with some polenta for lunch, a zero-dollar expense.

roughly 1/3 of the pantry supply, in all its mess

So over the next month or so I’ll be writing about how I’m mining my pantry, and sharing the cookbook or home-baked recipes that impress and excited me the most, that I think we all might benefit from. (Today we’ve got two!) I’ve already been eagerly rifling through my cookbook shelves, bookmarking¹ corn muffins and grilled rice paper and so much dal while I watch everyone cry at the Olympic weight lifting finals. I haven’t been this thrilled about cooking in a while. My deep-seated desire for efficiency is firing.

The best and first and often most enjoyable step in any home project is to make a list. Here is mine, all the things I want and wish to use up in hopefully delicious ways. (nb: I consider my pantry to include long-lasting stuff in the fridge and freezer.) Maybe you’d like to play along at home, make your own list. In the comments, tell me what you’ve been meaning to use up, or your favorite way to shop your pantry, or how you think I should consume this squid ink pasta that Jackson bought me from Eataly in 2023.

An incomplete and unofficial pantry inventory:

So many beans
So so many lentils
Polenta
Basmati rice
Squid ink pasta???

Randomly, a box of Jiffy cornbread mix
Half a bag of frozen rice cakes
Packet of frozen yuba (tofu skins)
Rice noodles, various
Rice paper wrappers

Three half-drunk bottles of wine to be used for cooking
An enormous tub of gochujang
Random bags of flour + a really old bag of Kodiak Cake pancake mix
Dried apricots :(
Two shelves of spices, dried chiles, and herbs I am often neglecting

I’ve currently got a big pot of beans (Rancho Gordo whipples) (see above) on the stove, simmering in some beef stock from the freezer, padded with leek tops (from my latest CSA haul) and a handful of chiles de árbol (years old, quart container). Plus a glug of some forgotten rosé. (Here, as always, is my bean methodology.) Today I’ve got two recipes for you, both of which can and will happily adorn a bowl of beans.

jar of scapes, half gone

Spicy Pickled Garlic Scapes

This recipe is adapted from Caroline Fidanza’s Saltie cookbook, my bible for fridge pickles. Last week I had a bunch of garlic scapes threatening to turn woody in my crisper drawer, and was tired of the pesto racket. So I took a hot pepper from the garden, chopped the scapes, and was shocked by the way that pickling them together infused so much heat into the whole jar. I also used some of the fancy apple cider vinegar I’ve been hoarding, which added some extra oomph to the brine. I’ve been spooning it over beans, cooked greens, eggs—basically everything. You could also use this recipe to pickle shallots, onions, carrots, hot peppers, etc.

1 bunch garlic scapes, ends and woody bits trimmed off, chopped
1 jalapeño, sliced
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon mustard seeds

Place the chopped scapes and sliced pepper in a jar. In a saucepan, combine the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, and spices and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar and salt. When they have dissolved, pour the mixture into the jar. Let cool at room temperature, then cover and refrigerate overnight. This will keep for up to 2 months.

Arielle Johnson’s Chile Butter

Full disclosure that I have not made this yet, but it’s on my to-do list for the weekend. The recipe comes from Arielle Johnson’s wonderful Flavorama, a book on the science of flavor that never feels overly science-y. I’ll be spooning this over my beans, maybe using it to cook some potatoes or adding it to pasta sauce. Arielle likes it because it makes things spicier “without adding contrasting heat in the form of hot sauce or red pepper flakes”. Yum :)

2 dried guajillo chiles
2 dried pasilla chiles (nb: I’ll be using whatever I scrounge up in my weird kitchen closet)
2 sticks unsalted butter
1 teaspoon dried urfa chile (let’s call this optional, though I love this stuff)
2 black peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon ground dried ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

Toast your chiles under a low broiler until crisp and just barely brown, about 1 to 2 minutes. Remove and discard stems and shake out seeds, then crumble the chiles and reserve.

Heat the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir in the crumbled chiles, urfa chile, peppercorns, ginger, and cloves. Turn off the heat, cover, and let sit on the stove for at least 1 hour, giving the butter a stir about every 15 minutes, and gently heating when it starts to solidift. Strain through a metal tea strainer into a heatproof container. When cooled to warm, transfer to a lidded container for storage. Use within 1 month.

Tell me in the comments what you’ve been meaning to use up, or your favorite way to shop your pantry! I wanna hear :)

1. I have been LOVING these Semikolon sticky tabs,