August 2007 Archives

Name: Katherine Steinberg

Occupation: Programming Manager at AOL Body

Borough: Manhattan

Relationship status: I’ve been tamed.

What did you eat today?

Stonyfield farms plain yogurt, Amy’s stir fried rice noodles with vegetables and tofu, a smores Luna bar, a couple of California rolls and a Wonka bar.

What do you never eat?

Fruit pie. I can’t handle the texture of baked fruit.

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

Amy’s frozen bean and cheese burritos, and that’s about all. I’m a grab-and-go kind of gal.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

The corkscrew. Sometimes a girl just needs a glass of wine.

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Ginger for sushi, Saigon Grill for their yummy Curry Ga and Old Devil Moon for brunch.

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

I would start with the baked eggs and goat cheese skillet and a biscuit at Clinton Street bakery. I’d also probably get a burger from there. And I know this is against the foodie grain, but I’d get a four cheese deep dish pizza from Pizza Unos. There, I said it.

Remember how I was like Pinkberry sucks? After hearing endless accolades from my friends, I had to give it another go. My friend Eddie said I had gone wrong by trying the green tea. I had to go original. With mochi.

And I did. And you know what? I was wrong. It's good. I mean, it's refreshing. And the soft mochi topping is inspired. I just wanted to dismiss it because it was the adopted sweet of all those plastic L.A. bots I can't stand. (Omigod, Pinkberry is like, so good? Will you hold my chihuahua while I get my Uggs on?)

Which is not to say I would choose it over Shake Shack's frozen custard with the pie of the day. Even though I probably should.

Anyway, my apologies to Pinkberry for talking smack before I really gave it a go. You're quite good, and I was quite wrong. You have a cute logo. You're kind of expensive, but you wouldn't charge that much if people weren't willing to pay. I'll probably patronize your establishment. At least until I can figure out if Red Mango is any good.

I am so sick of spam. I may migrate my site this weekend. If things are a bit screwy round here this week, it's because I'm closing up shop here and moving on up!

I was on Letterman on Thursday singing backup for Steve Earle (who, on top of being a folk/country badass legend, is also an actor on The Wire, one of my favorite TV shows of all time). If you saw it, the dreamy-voiced woman I was singing with is Allison Moorer, a really talented singer-songwriter.

I didn't tell you because I'm superstitious about things not happening if I announce them. But I'll tell you this: I sat next to Tina Fey in the makeup room and she brought her own lipstick, which is probably smart cause who knows what lips have been touched up by those brushes; Venus Williams is really tall, very pretty and has an 8-deep entourage; Letterman is tall but not crazy tall; and it really is COMPLETELY FRIGID in that theater. Like I could see my breath when I sang.

Now that it's happened, I can't find a YouTube clip, and it's not on Letterman's site, so I don't really have any proof. I wanted to take something with me as a memento, but I'm no klepto. Instead, I just bagged all of the free cookies from the dressing room. So here they are, real cookies from the Late Show's catering, yo. Mostly chocolate chip, with nuts or without, and a few oatmeal raisin. Believe.

My Mae seemed a little impressed, more impressed than she was with Carnegie Hall originally. Go figure. She apparently watches the Late Show when she can't sleep.

The thing that made me feel really New York glamorous was that I just walked to the theater from work, put my makeup on, sang, then hopped on the subway to meet everyone for dinner downtown. I love New York!

UPDATE: Here it is!

Name: Charlotte Druckman

Occupation: Freelance journalist

Borough: Manhattan

Relationship status: free as a bird

What did you eat today?

Sesame-banana cake from Birdbath bakery; Greek yogurt with honey from Honey Gardens Apiaries in Vermont (so very good) and blueberry granola; two glasses of rosé at Village; two crawfish dumplings, edamame & jicama salad, gai lan, miso-glazed salmon over mesclun and one diet Boylan’s rootbeer at Mooncake Foods; half of a coconut cookie from Birdbath.

What do you never eat?

pecans, walnuts and EYEBALLS

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

Homemade Greek yogurt and fig confiture from The Yogurt Place II; Ronnybrook Farms yogurt (vanilla and/or maple vanilla); a hunk of Ewephoria and whatever other cheese struck my fancy at Murray’s; an assortment of mustards; a bottle of prosecco, champers and/or rosé; diet peach Snapple; lemons; garlic; unsalted French butter; white miso paste; mango salsa from Citarella; Moroccan olives; soy sauce; ketchup; brownies and fat-free Reddi Wip

What is your favorite kitchen item?

wooden spoon

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Blue Ribbon Bakery, City Bakery, Momofuku Ssam, Mooncake Foods, Peasant, Supper, Village

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

A NYC restaurant crawl accompanied by bubbly and friends with forks at every turn:

Gusto’s octopus (and, if it’s tomato season, the panzanella salad)

Bavette cacio & pepe at Lupa

Momofuku Ssam pork buns, two please + a few glasses of The Black Chook

Bone Marrow at Blue Ribbon Bakery

Bacon-cheeseburger with sauteed onions, rare & cottage fries, well done + a bullshot at J.G. Melon

Joel Robuchon’s beef-and-foie-gras sliders

Uni sushi & toro sashimi at Sushi Yasuda

BOOT & RALLY

[HA! --Ed.]

A flight of desserts:

Balthazar’s tarte tatin

Trio of bread pudding:

- Peasant’s white-chocolate-and-fig bread pudding

- Blue Ribbon Bakery’s chocolate chip bread pudding

- Café Colonial’s chocolate croissant bread pudding

Mrs. Grossinger’s coffee ice cream & praline cake

And, if at all possible, a trough of rice pudding from La Régalade in Paris

(Do you think if I procured a palmier from Carette along with the pudding and saved it until the next morning, right before the execution, that’d be ok? Or, would that count as breakfast, ergo, another meal?)

[It's your fantasy. Besides, a palmier hardly counts as a meal. --Ed.]

Next time you visit a friend with a baby, ask them to save you some baby food jars. They're the perfect size for taking homemade vinaigrette to work. Just toss your ingredients in and shake them up when you're ready for lunch. The twist top means no spills. Best of all, smells don't carry over in glass, so I can make basil ginger soy dressing today (pictured here) and mix up a lime mint honey vinaigrette tomorrow.

Name: Diego Zambrano

Occupation: Art Director (www.workforfood.nu)

Borough: Brooklyn Heights

Relationship status: Unfortunately Single :(

What did you eat today?

Brazilian Barbecue and Pepperoni Pizza Slices...

What do you never eat?

Crap

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

Curry (red, black, green, yellow...), garlic, cheeses, Coke Zero, broccoli, jasmine rice, Haagen Dazs Sorbet Mango, red onion, BBQ sauce, Campbell's Chili, sweet corn, carrot, coconut milk, beer, water, sparkling water, basil, rosemary, wild oregano.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

My Le Creuset pans

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Bocca Lupo, an amazing and simple Italian restaurant hidden in the middle of Cobble Hill just few blocks from my apt (391 Henry St, at Warren St.) and Lovely Day, a tiny and perfect Thai restaurant in Nolita (196 Elizabeth St, between Spring and Prince St.)

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

Chicken with curry, broccoli, mushrooms, red onion, carrots, red pepper, garlic, wasabi, coconut milk, black beer, love and jasmine rice. A huge glass of Coke Zero with a lot of ice and Haagen Dazs Sorbet Mango to my last 60 seconds.

If I had to use two words to describe the tasting menu we had at Aquavit, they'd be "fruity fish".

Not exactly my cup of glogg, but I wouldn't mind downing another dram of the pear vanilla black pepper aquavit.

Sorry for the aside, folks, it's about to get geeky up in here. Come back tomorrow if you just want to hear about the food.

I was having a really lovely Saturday afternoon yesterday, so I decided to try and upload Movable Type 4.0, release candidate 4. I've been wanting to solve the spam problem I've had for months. Big mistake. 12 hours later, at 3:30 in the morning, thank goodness I had the sense to reboot my database. Complete disaster.

Much of the problem was my human error, I'm sure. I felt sympathy for the befuddled generation who couldn't figure out how to program a VCR. There are whipper snappers out there who could out-upload me in a second, I'm sure. True, the migration from Typepad to Movable Type was accomplished only with much hand-holding by my buddy Adam. But whatevs, I've been running this website for over three years now, surely I could handle a simple upgrade! But no, I got smacked down by the technology.

To anyone who's curious, MT 4.0 Release 4 beta LOOKS like a fine tool.

*The interface is a little blocky and cold, which I don't mind. <

*Comment clean-up seems much faster -- you can choose to display 100 comments at a time. There is apparently a CAPTCHA to reduce spam, which I couldn't find in my republishings of the site.

*I liked the rich text editor, which I would much prefer to the hand-coding labor I do on my current iteration of MT 3.2.

*MT 4.0 beta's rc from 6/27/07 seemed to upload to my server in a snap but was a little buggy, so I upgraded to rc4 and my site crashed.

*I liked the added option of allowing tags, keyword editing, excerpts because I like the science of SEO. I wouldn't necessarily use them, but I like that they're an option.

And really, I read the documentation (well, I read it after I crashed my website), but in one part, it says to upload the MT folder into a cgi-bin folder, and in another, it says it should live on the root. And I would recommend a fresh start upload instead of an overwrite because otherwise, you'll have to go through and clean out all your plug-ins, which may prevent your database from getting configured. You'll have to re-upload all your plug-ins, but I don't actually use very many so it's not a problem with me. (Also, I think Blogroll doesn't work in MT 4 yet.)

I'm just going to wait til the bugs are fixed and the release is stable and approved by many before I shepherd everything over. The release candidate from June 27 didn't crash the site, but the current release candidate did. For the curious: I think it's the templates. I'd have to rebuild all my templates from scratch because MT 4.0 has a new system of templating which you have to use in order to publish anything. I've realized that I built my website in this hodge podge coat of many colors way (Dolly's coat, not Joseph's coat). So a migration to the new system means building the site from the bottom up. The code and tags would be much cleaner, but it's hard to commit to that kind of work.

I also learned that I have lost many of your comments to the spam filter. If you've ever written a comment and it didn't get posted, it's not because I didn't like your comment. It's because I'm having this horrible spam problem and your comment got shifted into the manure pile of tramadol prescriptions, cheap airfare and enthusiastic ladies who think I have a "Very good site!! :-)" The commenter trusting option has never worked on my MT, and the 18,000 spam comments I have effectively bury the real comments.

Anyway, an upgrade TK. Whether I move to Wordpress or MT 4. I guess it's time to redesign, too. If any of you have any advice for this old broad, I'm all ears.

(If you were my therapist, or my friend Julie, you might say, Ganda, you quit your freelance assignments in order to free up some time for a social life. And yet, here you are, shackled to your computer. You didn't go out last night because you were migrating folders back and forth on the FTP. Don't you think it's time you left good enough alone and went out and dated once in a while? To which I might reply by mumbling something under my breath about having to clear out my spam box while staring at my shoes.)

Name: Winnie Yang [Not to be confused with Winnie Chang. --Ed.]

Occupation: Food, obviously. But also: editor, PR monkey

Borough: Brooklyn

Relationship status: Possibly on to something; time will tell.

What did you eat today?

Breakfast: A pint each of blueberries and cherries and four plums, all from the Greenmarket.

Lunch: Roasted beets and carrots and a radish, mizuna, and arugula salad with lemon juice, pumpkinseed oil, and Maldon sea salt. All the produce is either from my Hearty Roots CSA share or the Union Square Greenmarket. The pumpkinseed oil is one of my current obsessions. Great with scrambled eggs. And the Maldon is one of those life-changing ingredients I proselytize to everyone who doesn’t already use it. (And yeah, I’m a name-dropper when it comes to my food. If you’re not down with that, I wouldn’t recommend scrolling down any further. Credit where credit’s due.) [I love me some Maldon too. --Ed.]

Dinner: I made succotash with fresh corn, dried limas, bacon, and Evans Farm milk; sautéed some sugar snap peas from the Greenmarket; and baked off a sformato (with Alleva Dairy ricotta) and topped it with some caramelized scallions. Washed down with Dolianova Vermentino di Sardegna. Dessert: Twig Farm Square Cheese (which, along with the ricotta, came from Saxelby Cheesemongers) and Nevat (from Despaña), which might very well be my new favorite cheese.

What do you never eat?

A wise man once said, “If I don’t love it, I don’t swallow.” I’ll eat anything as long as it was made with love. That said, there is one dish that I just can’t abide – nervetti, which is this Italian dish of chewy boiled strips of calf’s foot and shin served cold and with onions. Tendon is one of my favorite offal cuts, but really, this is akin to eating onion-flavored snot. Not to gross you out or anything. Truth be told, I ate that once. Never again.

I’m also not a big fan of sun-dried tomatoes. But I’ll eat them.

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

Sriracha, Dijon mustard, beer, wine (right now: Prosecco and Lambrusco), whatever’s peaking at the Greenmarket, heaps of CSA veg, sourdough starter, ice cream custard base chilling for imminent churning, Ronnybrook whole milk and cream (hanging around until they become custard base) and also their whole-milk yogurt, Tello or Knoll Krest eggs, capers, pickles, kimchi, six pounds of Tamarack Hollow slab bacon, and the best butter in the world, salted La Baratte des Gourmets. A lot of fermentation going on in there. [Where do you get that butter? I must try it! -- Ed.]

What is your favorite kitchen item?

The Cadillac of home ice-cream makers, the Cuisinart ICE-50BC. Well, until I can afford the Musso 4080 Lussino. Which would be the, what, Maserati of ice-cream makers? [Winnie's Guinness ice cream with chocolate stout cake is the stuff that dreams are made of. --Ed.]

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Flushing (J&L food court, Nan Bei He, and the lamb-on-a-stick street cart), Momofuku Ssam, Prune, Marlow & Sons.

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

A couple dozen oysters right at the water’s edge somewhere in the Cote d’Azur or Brittany.

A taste each of:
country ham (a sampling from Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and definitely some from Allan Benton), prosciutto di San Daniele, jamón iberico, jambon de Bayonne, culatello, porchetta, lechón, cochon de lait, cochinita pibil, the suckling pig and Middle White at St. John, my mom’s spare ribs, Peking duck, a thigh piece of the fried chicken from Bon Ton Mini Mart, a perfectly roasted Bresse chicken.

A perfect, ripe peach, just picked and still warm from the sun.

Mangosteen.

My mom’s potstickers.

And definitely a random leftover from my fridge that I didn’t even know was there. That’s sometimes the best stuff, and since the world is ending, a pleasant surprise might be nice before, you know, annihilation.

Visit Winnie's blog, thatswhatyouthink.wordpress.com.