I wouldn’t immediately think of carrots as my favorite vegetable but I eat them more than any other vegetable by far, almost every day. Over at Food 52, check out these carrot recipes, include this really tasty one, grilled tarragon carrots.

Nate nerds up to the salad bar.

Yeah, it’s mad salty, but it’s still good.

Frank Bruni reviews Gabrielle Hamilton’s new memoir:

After much anticipation, the inevitable memoir has arrived. “Blood, Bones and Butter” traces nearly all of Hamilton’s life and career, from an unmoored childhood through her triumph at Prune, which didn’t end the search for a sense of place and peace that is the overarching theme of this autobiography, as of so many others. It’s a story of hungers specific and vague, conquered and unappeasable, and what it lacks in urgency (and even, on occasion, forthrightness) it makes up for in the shimmer of Hamilton’s best writing.

Recalling her mother’s penchant for heavy eyeliner, she flashes back to “the smell of the sulfur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil.” Hamilton invokes the “voluptuous blanket of summer night humidity,” captures the tantalizing promise of delicate ravioli by observing that “you could see the herbs and the ricotta through the dough, like a woman behind a shower curtain,” and compares breast feeding to being cannibalized, “not in huge monster-gore chunks, but like a legion of soft, benign caterpillars makes lace of a leaf.”

The description of the ravioli is great. I’ve never been to Hamilton’s restaurant, Prune, but it sounds tempting.

You put your peanut butter in my popcorn…

From Serious Eats.

Best Pizza is reviewed in the Times:

Most garlic knots let you down. After one or two salty, satisfying bites, you’re left to chew on the increasingly impenetrable thing like a masticating cow. It’s a snack food for suckers and optimists, anybody with a Charlie Brown-like faith that maybe Lucy Van Pelt won’t pull away the football, that this time it might be great.

The garlic knots ($3 for six) at Best Pizza in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, deliver on that hope. Baked in a century-old brick oven, they arrive charred on top and creamy inside, more gougère than repurposed crust. There are no tricks, just good technique: dough that rises all day; a drizzle of garlic oil after the knots come out of the oven; a dusting of shaved pecorino; chopped parsley, because that’s what you do. The knots are served on a flimsy paper plate with pickled vegetables (fennel, mostly) because Best Pizza is a slice joint, where $3 will feed you, and $15 will pay for a feast.

The good–it looks damn tasty, the bad, it’s in Williamsburg. But if you happen to find yourself in Hipster Dufus Heaven, looks like it is worth checking out.

[Photo Credit: Brooklyn 365]

For the unleavened experience…

Check out this piece on Matzo.

Feast on this food and art coolness via food 52.

Oh, yes, please.

David Lebovitz, again and again.

Brunch at Tipsy Parson in Manhattan.

Fabulous fatness. Mmm, mmm, good.

Say it ain’t so…

[Photo Credit: Radaris, Nabok]

I had dinner at my aunt and uncle’s on the Upper West Side a few weeks ago and we got to talking about Morris, the deli counter man at the old Daitch Shopwell that used to be on Broadway. They loved Morris and the little old ladies who would visit him. This is what they overheard, back when.

Old Lady: Is the potato salad fresh?

Morris: Yes, we made it today.

Old Lady: It looks like yesterday.

Morris: Lady, you’re from yesterday.

Old Lady: How’s the roast beef?

Morris: It’s gorgeous.

Old Lady: Give me a half of a quarter pound of baloney.

Morris: You’re having a party?


Pass the peas like they used to say…

I love peas, even though the wife says they don’t count as vegetables (“too carby”). But they are another sign that spring is near even though the frozen petite peas are great year round. Head on over to Saveur and check out 16 recipes for young green peas.

And even if you don’t dig peas, bounce to this:

[Photo Credit: Adventures in Shaw]

Liz the Chef is spotlighted over at Food 52.

Her mama’s magno chutney looks tasty.

It is dark and wet this morning so let’s get right to some nourishment of the sinful kind. The New York Times gives a tour of the best doughnut shops in town.

[Photo Credit: NY Mag and Good Point]

Fluffy Vanilla Marshmellows? Vhy d’hell not?

Seven Spoons gets chunky mit de flavor.

Thanks to the good people at Saveur, I found this great site, that is digging through the old Gourmet Magazine archives. Food Porn at it’s (dated) best.

At Diner’s Journal, Edward Schneider writes about Pizza with no sauce but plenty of flavor.

Pop.

Bucatini All’Amatriciana last night at my aunt and uncle’s on the Upper West Side.

Simply the best.