eat drink one woman

Or, as my friend Jeanne calls it, "Singles Awareness Day".

In case you missed my squeaky WNYC debut this morning:

And for the lovers:

[from La Doug.]

If you find yourself spending a Saturday checking out the Dia:Beacon and wondering what your life would be like if you became an ex-urbanite, you must head over to Homespun Foods on Beacon's brief Main Street.

Homespun's menu reminds me of Berkeley cafés, where butter, whole grains, vegans and charcuterie lovers can coexist harmoniously. The pastry case alone warrants a visit. City ex-pat Jessica Reisman and her crew craft the breads and delicate pastries for sale behind the counter, and everything I've had is amazing. The daily assortment is staggering, and can include mini apricot frangipane tarts, perfect blond chocolate chip cookies, spicy dark chocolate cookies sprinkled with crunchy sugar crystals, and a divine coffee cake that changes seasonally (the current incarnation is a cardamom pecan crumb-topped coffee cake that I will be dreaming of).

Don't miss the daily specials -- the ingenious vegetarian moussaka I tried yesterday is made of saucy, cinnamon-spiced wheatberries, layered with silky, thin slices of Asian eggplant, topped with a light layer of bechamel and served with an olive-topped Greek salad, all for $9.95. Protein-packed vegetarian meatloaf is made with nuts and cheeses and served with a creamy mushroom gravy -- my friend Julie's toddler loves it. The soups, salads and sandwiches on the regular menu, which leans heavily Mediterranean, are all whole and healthy with plenty of richness and flavor to keep the food from being boring. Colorful quiches and soups (I think there were four soups on the menu yesterday) rotate daily on the chalkboard menu. They cater to carnivores, too -- while we were there, we watched (and smelled) dinner's beef brisket being browned in its own fat behind the kitchen's open proscenium window.

Mismatched tables and chairs give the place a cheery nonchalance. Young local couples and their children (whom Jessica seems to know by name) wheel in and out of the place all day long, while arty types in stripes and Converse grab golden baguettes, olives and Coach Farm goat cheese logs from the small refrigerated case. In the summer, diners can even make an evening of dinner and a movie shown in Homespun's pretty garden patio. It's the kind of place I wish we had in Brooklyn. I'd happily eat there every day if I worked at the Dia.

Homespun Foods
232 Main St.
Beacon, NY 12508

Name: Adam Houghtaling

Occupation: Editorial Director, gourmet.com [Nice work on the relaunch! --Ed.]

Borough: Brooklyn

Relationship Status: SWM

What did you eat today?

Coffee. And a couple delicious bites from the test kitchen that I'm not really allowed to talk about. Mostly just the coffee though… but it is only 10:30 in the morning. [Lucky duck! --Ed.]

What do you never eat?

Shrimp

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:

Six mustards, three beers and one bottle of prosecco.

What is your favorite kitchen item:

Hands down…the cutting board. It's understated and humble. Not irrationally needy like the knives or starved for attention like the crème brulee torch or the… uh… mango pitter.

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Mostly around my place in Fort Greene: Choice Market, Bonita, Pillow Café, Smoke Joint, Locanda, Luz, etc.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

I would like the short ribs from Cafe Gray and a malted chocolate milkshake. And warm tortilla chips with guacamole. And also blueberry pancakes.

Is it too late to add a lobster roll…because, yes…lobster roll.

From the man himself. Voilà!

Chris Scott's Sweet Potato Fluff

Real simple...it's basically a sweet potato soufflé.

2 sweet potatoes
1 c. milk (warm)
1 stick of butter
[Wow, a stick of butter for two sweet potatoes! You don't mess around! --Ed.]
1/8 tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. allspice
1/8 tsp. cloves
(all ground)
1/4 c brown sugar
6 egg whites

Peel, rough chop and boil potatoes. Drain water and put into a mixer. A bowl and a hand blender will do if you dont have a mixer. Add milk ,butter, spices, sugar and a couple pinches of salt. Blend till like mashed potatoes. Cool. Separately whip egg whites till firm, fold in with potato mixture. Place into a buttered soufflé dish and bake at 375 till puffy and done. ( when a skewer comes out dry). Garnish with marshmallow, or my new favorite -- eat it with spicy roast pork. [Yu-um. --Ed.]

What good is a blog if you can't advertise your own idiocy every once in a while?

I lost my keys. They have a green skull key cap and a purple skull key cap, as well as a skeleton key. I lost them somewhere between home (Sunset Park) and Murray Hill (work). Lord knows I didn't go anywhere else yesterday. I took the D train to work at about 8:45am and the N train home at about 9.

SMALL FOOD REWARD: I'll take you out to al di la or buy you $50 worth of cheese.

I know I've got an ice cube's chance in hell of getting my keys back this way, but I figure it's worth a shot.

Extra credit existential question: Would I have heard the keys drop out of my pocket if I wasn't listening to the iPod?

Extra credit grammatical question: Is it Would I have...wasn't listening or Would I have...weren't listening?

Name: Chris Scott

Occupation: Executive Chef at NYC's largest corporate dining firms

Borough: Park Slope, Brooklyn

Relationship status: Impatiently waiting for the right woman.

What did you eat today?

Four Story Hill Farm Chicken en Sous Vide, (actually, I'm cooking it as we speak), a light morning Hendricks gin martini, scrambled eggs with porcini mushrooms. And its only 11am.... so much more food to discover. [A light morning martini? I didn't know you could do that. --Ed.]

What do you never eat?

Probably nothing, I'm always open to tasting and exploring flavors.

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:
Udon, and some broth I have concocted, milk, chicken and beef bones for stock. Recently, I've been on a chicken feet kick...they're in my fridge and in my freezer. Beer, tons of veggies, frozen broths, etc etc.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

Geez, too many to choose from. My Misono kitchen knife... first and foremost. My new toy... a dehydrator, where I make my own spice blends... such as black olive and garlic dust. Lobster roe and sea salt, Clementine powder, candied celery powder... to use on goat milk ice cream.

Where do you eat out most frequently?

I dig Artisanal, almost perfect wine selection. Momofuku, Degustation, and Franny's in the BK.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

I think I would rather cook than to eat. Maybe alongside my grandmother, and make all the wonderful things she made for me as a child. Fried potatoes and onions with poached eggs, apple dumplings, sweet potato fluff, roast chicken with lemon and sage.

Damn. Gourmet.com's shmancy party made me feel like a gauche-ass freeloader. The fete was thrown at Bar Boulud, with Daniel Boulud himself holding court for a gathering of chefs, writers, editors, and buttoned up bloggers. Patés galore (my favorite being the guinea hen), a line snaking through the stainless steel kitchen, a succulent boudin noir, and enough chefs to program PBS for five straight Sundays. By the end of the night, they were practically pouring the syrah down our throats. The blond wood and fish-scale covered railroad space was quite comf and roomy. I'll have to check out Bar Boulud for pre-Met nosh.

As someone who's worked in online for almost ten years now (yikes), I've lived through the days of Aeron chairs for all to being treated like the flowers in the attic. These days, attention is being paid to dotcom, and this party seemed to say, quite clearly, Gourmet.com is Gourmet. Obvs we are not enjoying the same economic boom we were during the first internet bubble, but the bloggers are being taken very seriously. By now, I see a lot of familiar faces at these things and I wonder -- if I started this blog in 2007 instead of 2004, would I still be able to get my name on this guest list? Ten years from now (hell, three years from now), will I be supplanted by the pepper sprouts in some uncharted new medium?

Meanwhile, they kept running these clips of David Pasternack pulling the foreskin off a giant penis.

Here are some pics before I go to bed.

I'm back! A trillion thanks to Janet for keeping the seat warm! These last 12 weeks have been rough. But, in the last week, I did manage to meet up with Tanya, an EDOW reader who's a sculptor in Barcelona. (How did I accrue such a cool readership? Only you know the answer to that one, my friends.) We met up to share a bottle of Sauvignon Collio 2005 Ronco dei Tassi, a nice, acidic, full white from Friuli, over a plate of fritto misto. (Enoteca I Trulli -- very civilized for an after-work glass of wine.) Our reason for meeting up? She managed to smuggle a package of jamón ibérico de bellota from Spain for me.

How gorgeous is that? A queen among hams, bellota meat is maroon, dark like bresaola, not heavily streaked with fat. She recommended letting the refrigerated ham sit out for two hours to come to room temp so you can really taste the acorns in the fat, then serving atop slices of good baguette rubbed with ripe tomato, with fat arbequina olives and a glass of rioja or Iberian wine on the side. Obviously we're a long ways away from ripe tomatoes, so I may have to skip that part, but I'm really excited about digging in. I'll let you know how it goes. Apparently, in Spain, you just keep a leg of the jamón covered on your counter and carve thin slices off using the jamonero whenever you get hungry. I've promised to harass Tanya if I ever make it over to Spain. I gotta go to a country whose people know how to keep a pork leg on the counter for a year.

Jamón ibérico de bellota was only recently legalized in the States. If you're not going to make it to Spain anytime soon, you can get on a waiting list at Tienda.com.

Name: Allan Roth

Occupation: Political Science Graduate Student

Borough: Manhattan

Relationship status: Single

What did you eat today?

Turkey, egg, and cheese breakfast wrap.

What do you never eat?

The kimchi my roommate brings home.

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:

Flour, butter, eggs, sage.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

Chef’s knife.

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Sitting? Deluxe. Standing? Roti Roll Bombay Frankie.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

Boiled crawfish. Pecan pie. Abita Amber.

Visit Allan's blog at rattlemycage.wordpress.com.

So this is not-Ganda, which is to say, it's Janet here with a story of love and baking.
I met Kperl's brownies before I met him. A mutual friend invited us to her pot luck New Year's Eve party last year, and he showed up with two pans of his brownies (with nuts and without). Brownies are pretty much my favorite dessert ever, but I'm EXTREMELY PICKY. Not too fudgy, not too cakey (I think that was a cover line from Cook's Illus.) Not too sweet. Very chocolatey, with at touch of salt.
So I go to this party where I'm supposed to meet this guy and I'm kind of avoiding it because it's awkward, but suddenly on the food table, wedged in next to spinach dips and cheese boards and bowls of hummus, are two pans of really moist, dark, beautiful brownies. I dig in. I take one bite. I look at Sari in wonder and say, "Who made these?" And she points across the room at Kperl, and says, "him."