Got Weird Stuff in Your Pantry? Get Answers with NPR’s “Cook Your Cupboard” Project

This is for all you adventurous food shoppers out there—you ambitious connoisseurs of the obscure with big ideas and perhaps less-than-stellar follow-through. (You know who you are.)

I, for one, fall squarely into this category. Not only because I’m a food blogger, but because I’m more of an “ideas” gal. I find inspiration far simpler than implementation.

So frequently I find myself with strange foods on hand—giant white corn, tamarind paste, and kelp noodles, to name a few. Whether purchased on a whim or for a complicated recipe I never got around to, offbeat ingredients like these loiter in my cabinets, waiting for me to make the time to figure out what to do with them.

Now NPR has a solution: the Cook Your Cupboard project. (Thanks to LifeHacker for the heads-up!) Simply head over to the “Cook Your Cupboard” Tumblr page, submit a picture of the ingredients that have you stumped (there are different themes every few weeks), and get ideas from others on what to do with your pantry perplexities. If you’re extra lucky, you might even be chosen to get advice on your ingredients from a chef on NPR’s Morning Edition.

So what have you got to lose? This week, they just want to see three “questionable” items from your kitchen. I submitted my kelp noodles, tamarind paste, and giant white corn. The better question is, what’s lurking in your pantry?