You Are What You Eat, Anne Eisenberg

Name: Anne Eisenberg (on the right, with her daughter Jewlia on the left)

Occupation: Writer

Borough: Manhattan

What did you eat today?  
Today I had some very bad news of a cancelled project—one in which I had invested a lot of hope—so to recover I hit the cookbooks and made a fresh pizza and an elegant pudding to follow for dinner, and chased away the blues that way.  [Your cooking always cheers me up too.  --Ed.]  Here are the details:

Breakfast:  scrambled eggs and Canadian bacon; coffee.

Lunch:  leftovers from dinner the night before:  roasted broccoli and cod from Bouley, which sells wonderfully fresh fish in a small market downstairs from the restaurant.  Then came the bad news and out came the cookbooks:

Dinner:  I made a pizza based loosely on recipes by Wolfgang Puck and Mark Bittman.  For the dough, I used yeast that I activated with warm water; flour and salt.  It rose well and was fun to spin and spread by hand until it was a large disc.  For a topping I started with leftover goat cheese and pot cheese, plus some nutmeg.  Then I browned some bacon and then sautéed shallots and apple chunks, and added those.  Then I sliced some grape tomatoes and added them, ending by sprinkling all of it with fresh thyme.  It was delicious.  We had it with a red wine from P.J. Wines.  They are a wineshop in uptown Manhattan that has low prices and a wide selection of delicious, inexpensive wines, plus they deliver.  This wine was an Argentinian Malbec.

For dessert I made an orange bread pudding from the old-fashioned but delicious New York Times Cookbook of Craig Clairborne.  Butter ramekins. Preheat oven to about 350. While it’s warming up, soak two slices of bread, cubed (about 1 cup), in scalded milk; then add four beaten egg yolks plus the zest of an orange and its juice, plus half a cup of sugar and some salt.  Dot with butter and put in something larger that holds water.  Bake in moderate over for about 30 minutes.  The pudding turns into a custard that holds its shape, so if you bake it in ramekins and turn them out, you have these elegant flan-like dishes, but they are orange flavored and light.

What do you never eat?
Lamb intestines; bamboo; kidneys.

Complete this sentence:  In my refrigerator, you can always find:
butter; eggs; cheeses; ricotta; onions; lemons; left-over wine to use for cooking.

What is your favorite kitchen item?
My heavy frying pan, which I just threw away because the surface has decayed.  When I recover from mourning the loss, I will buy a new one heavy enough to put in the oven and make perfect tart tatins, cornbread, and pineapple upsidedown cake.

Where do you eat out most frequently?
In Tribeca, at different restaurants in the neighborhood.  There are dozens of them here.

World ends tomorrow.  What would you like for your last meal?
The tasting menu at Bouley, each course paired with wines.