You Are What You Eat, Winnie Yang

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.