“The Yearlong Pantry,” Erin Alderson’s new cookbook, is not so much a book about cooking in-season, then storing for later use. It’s more about how to cook with grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, ingredients that you can KEEP in your pantry and pull out at any time of year to create nourishing, satisfying meals. It’s vegetarian, too.
Rethinking Grains
If you pay attention to food influencers, life is not only a constant party (it’s not) but also a protein-filled smorgasbord. Grains are either ignored or turned into the latest “don’t,” their lurking carbs some sort of secret code for “this will make you fat.” Like Erin Alderson, who approaches food wholistically, I like grains as part of a whole foods diet. While I cannot properly digest gluten (wah!), oats, quinoa, corn, rice, and all kinds of beans and legumes are part of my cooking. These ingredients make the meals I prepare for my family well-rounded and satisfying. We all need to eat SOME carbs. Kids need more. (Read up on nutrition guidelines for kids from the Mayo Clinic.)
If you choose whole carbs – that is, not packaged, ultra-processed foods but the cracked grains, nuts, and seeds that Alderson focuses on in this book – you’ll benefit from all that yummy fiber, too. And I do mean yummy. Alderson does everything with grains from pickling them and serving them atop chipotle-braised cauliflower (page 41) to pureeing them to make dressings, a la Greens with Green Goddess Tahini Dressing (p. 207).
Recipes I Made
It’s not hard to find beans or corn or rice or quinoa but finding einkorn, teff, and freekeh required diving into the offerings at my farmers’ market and the bulk bins at the closest co-op grocery. Once that was sorted, I launched into The Yearlong Pantry my making Harissa-Roasted Delicata Squash and Couscous (p. 53). Yes, I swapped the couscous for quinoa (1:1) and used a kabocha squash instead of a delicata. I also purchased harissa instead of making my own. That meant the recipe came together in minutes and smelled heavenly as it baked. For Romesco Mayocoba Beans over Polenta (p. 140), I substituted cannellini as Alderson suggests. The simple sauce added heaps of flavor to a dish. All in, even with the nuts, I spent less than $10 on this dinner. The kids liked it, too!
I chose Lentil Sloppy Joe’s (p. 163) because my family asked for variations on the joe’s theme and I was looking for ways to add more lentils to our meals. The sauce is classic (brown sugar and tomato), updated with balsamic vinegar and allspice. It was not cloyingly sweet, offers some flavor complexity, and the spring slaw topping was easy, too. Sesame-Gochujang Cauliflower Lettuce Wraps (p. 210) challenged me a bit. I had never tossed cauliflower with corn starch and potato starch, then baked it as an alternative for deep frying. Once I had the cauliflower baked and stirred it into the gochujang-butter sauce, the taste was definitely there but the dish looked quite gloppy. Next time, I’ll thin the sauce to make it easier to toss.
Fennel-Herb Beets (p. 219) spoke to me. Alderson toasts crushed fennel seeds and nutritional yeast, then tosses in scallions and fresh herbs to make a fresh, toasty vinaigrette. Though I roasted the beets instead of Alderson’s boil method, my father-in-law, visiting from Switzerland, liked it so much, he asked for thirds.
Who Would Like This Cookbook
Alderson’s cookbook book offers a holistic way to think about food and cooking. And carbs! As in my review of Forage.Gather.Feast, this cookbook got me thinking about how to cook with what is in front of me – in this case, in my pantry – affordably. I could toast nuts and seeds to add crunch to an ordinary salad (Spring Salad with Toasted Buckwheat, p. 99) or whip up one-pot dinner in a flash (Chipotle Pinto Bean Stew, p. 126). Turn cheese into dinner (Paneer Bowls with Pistachio Dukkah, p. 199).
There’s no rocket science here. There is plentiful enthusiasm for any cook to take everyday staples and transform the humdrum into flavorful vegetarian meals loaded with character. And carbs! Squirreling away the money you just saved on dinner is a nice perk, too.
I was provided a preview copy of “The Yearlong Pantry.” The cookbook, released on October 22, is available at major bookstores or via this link.
