Recipe: Ruth Reichl’s Savory Sweet Pasta for Michael

There’s a joke in my family that I inherited my love of the daily market run from my dad. It hardly ever bothers me to run to the store to pick up a few items to make dinner. In fact, I love poking around the produce aisle for something that inspires, reading the back of packages, and staring into the infinite abyss of the cereal aisle, even if I end up walking away empty-handed.

But you know what? Languid trips to the store don’t happen that often for the sake of time and efficiency. Most of the time, my grocery store runs are directly influenced by what’s in the pantry. When I head to the store, I’m thinking about what items to buy to add something fresh to the staples I already have on hand. And it turns out Ruth Reichl has the same strategy in mind.

In Ruth Reichl’s latest cookbook, “My Kitchen Year,” she chronicles the year she spent sorting through the shock of Gourmet‘s abrupt closure. I’ve been waiting a long time for this book; I think many fans have been waiting for it too — and I’m pleased to say it delivers. The recipes are honest, approachable, and illustrate what it means to find comfort in the home kitchen after an unsettling life change.

Each recipe in the book is split up into ingredients to shop for and the staples to have on hand. The staples are further broken down into refrigerator staples, pantry staples, vegetable staples, and unusual staples, which include everything from fish sauce to Sriracha to kimchi. This is about home cooking, after all — to do it often and with imagination, having a smartly stocked pantry is essential.

This pasta from Reichl leans heavily on anchovies — one of my favorite pantry staples — for the briny undercurrent that coils around each piece of pasta and gives the dish its savory balance despite the generous scattering of yellow raisins. Kalamata olives and cauliflower, which gets roasted until golden, are the only things she expects you to shop for. Which means I still get to wander around the grocery store a bit when I stop in to pick up the cauliflower to make this dish. But I don’t linger too long, you see, because most of what I need is already waiting for me at home.