These dishes are an antidote to holiday indulgences

This is the week we banish certain items from the pantry and relegate them to the depths of the freezer. Out go chocolates and cookies and many other indulgences. We don't buy potatoes or French baguettes for a while, and we stash the jasmine rice so high on the shelf it's hard to reach. Ditto polenta. In their place sit neatly labeled containers boasting bulgur, short- and long-grain brown rice, and quinoa. We're determined to get our pre-holiday waistlines back if it kills us, and whole grains seem to be the quick route.

We began a fascination with brown rice a long time ago, and simmered it with various amounts of liquid until we got the ratio of water to rice just right. Once we figured out which grower's rice we liked, we continued to buy the same brand. On Sundays, when there's plenty of time, we make a pot of brown rice the long way -- simmering it for 45 minutes in an ordinary pot -- and slide a casserole of winter vegetables into the oven as well (these take 1 1/2 hours but don't require your attention). Speedier vegetables are made Chinese-style in a wok, our favorites with a mixture of fermented black beans and ginger. The rice can also go into a pressure cooker for 20 minutes, which means that you don't need a leisurely weekend day to make it.

Bulgur demands more exotic fare. The pebble-like grains are often labeled ''bulgur number 4" at Middle Eastern markets. To cook the wheat grains, first we toast them in a little oil, then add chicken or vegetable stock; the finished dish resembles a traditional rice pilaf. From the new ''Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent," by the award-winning Toronto-based writers Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, comes a North Indian cauliflower dish in a curried tomato-onion sauce, which goes well with bulgur. Any saucy, highly seasoned vegetable or poultry dish can also accompany the grains.

Quinoa can be simmered in salted water, but it's pretty tasteless. Like bulgur, it benefits from toasting first, which gets the grains hot and intensifies their flavor. Also cooked pilaf-style, the mixture is quite chewy and needs a saucy dish, like a chicken saute or steamy fillets of fish.

We are new to quinoa, but the texture of these minute dots is fascinating. The only item in the pantry smaller is the colored sugar we used last month on all kinds of confections. But the sugar has been pushed to the back of the shelf. Grains are front and center.