Yo, check out this recipe for homemade Nutella over at the most cool blog, I made that!

Or if your fat ass is feelin’ lazy, just go out and cop one of these:

David Lebovitz gives us roasted pumkin.

Thanks, Hoss.

Nah, I haven’t been to Four and Twenty Blackbirds in Brooklyn yet.

But I aim to change that in the near future.

Foodie fun for Halloween from the fine ladies of Food52….

Salted Pumpkin Caramels from Food52 on Vimeo.

I’m not a huge fan of root beer though I sure do love a root beer float.

Check out this root beer taste test over at Serious Eats.

Two cool NYC food cats:

I’ve had these at Ssam and one cold day this winter I’m a try ’em at home.

Dig the recipe. I love that he uses cilantro stems. Why not, right? And the mint really makes it sing.

Deconstruction fun.

By Marina Ekroos.

Peace to Saveur for the link.

Is it too soon to miss the Yanks, yet?

Fall is here. Last Night’s Dinner remains…dopelicious.

I poured the milk on my sons’ Rice Crispies this morning. “Who wants to hear the cereal talk?” Turns out, both of them wanted to hear the cereal talk, so breakfast was a smashing success. (Is there any meal, except maybe pizza, that your children do not have to duped into eating?)

As they sat there at the table, I paced back and forth as the coffee brewed on the counter. “Today’s lesson is about not giving up,” I told them. “Let’s not worry about losing, because if you actually lose, there will be plenty of time to worry about it after the fact.”

“What?” asked the three-year old. He says “What?” very sweetly, but it’s hard to distinguish whether he doesn’t understand or if he just wasn’t listening. This time, it was probably both.

“I’m talking about the Yankees,” I said. “Yankees!” said the three year-old. “Boom!” said the 21-month old.

“Yeah, the Yankees need more boom. They lost last night,” I said.

“I like De-rak Jeee-tuh and Mar-i-an-oh,” said the three-year old. “Me too.”

“Snap, crackle, pop,” said the cereal.

When we went out the door for school, I asked them if they wanted to wear their Yankee hats or their Stegosaurus hats. “I want my Yankee hat,” said the three-year old. “And me,” said the 21-month old. I checked the temperature, 48 degrees. Hmm, yeah, we don’t need to cover their ears this morning.

“Where’s your Yankee hat, Daddy?” asked the three-year old. I went into the bedroom and couldn’t find it. I grabbed my 1936 Cooperstown Collection version from the pile on my dresser and slammed it down on my head. “How about that one?”

“Bay-ball,” said the 21-month old.

“Snap, crackle, pop,” I said. “Let’s go Yank-ees.” And we walked out the door and into the first morning that it really felt like October.

A week from today the season could be over or the Yanks could be getting ready to play in another Whirled Serious.

We’re lucky to even have another week to look forward to, and starting tomorrow night, Cliff Lee vs. Andy Pettitte…it should be lively.

In the meantime, enjoy a lovely, cool fall day in New York. Those of us with Cablevision are shut-out of the first game, but the Jets are on at 4.

Let’s Go Sun-Day.

Food pern, via Time Out New York.

Dig the origins of 10 Food Phrases over at cool site called Mental Floss:

Sowing Your Wild Oats: Avena fatua, a species of grass in the oat genus, has been referred to as “wild oats” by the English for centuries. Though it’s thought to be the precursor of cultivated oats, farmers have long hated it because it is useless as a cereal crop and hard to separate from cultivated oats and remove from fields. Literally sowing wild oats, then, is a useless endeavor, and the phrase is figuratively applied to people engaging idle pastimes. There’s also a sexual connotation in that a young man sowing his wild oats is spreading seed without purpose.The saying is first recorded in English in 1542, by Protestant clergyman Thomas Becon.

A Piece of Cake: The earliest appearance I can find is in Ogden Nash’s Primrose Path in 1936, and the phrase seems to have descended from the earlier “cakewalk.” This second term originates with a 19th-century African American tradition where slaves or freedmen at social gatherings or parties would walk in a procession in pairs around a cake and the most graceful pair would win the cake as a prize (this may also be the origin of “takes the cake”). Although the cakewalk contest demanded some skill and grace, the phrase was eventually adopted as boxing slang and flipped to connote an easily-won fight.

Master Class in Session…

Breakfast with Bittman.

[Photo Credit: Evan Sung]

Sunday night eats. And no Yankee game so we can digest. Hope y’all are having a good one.

Dig this New York Magazine profile on April Bloomfield, the chef behind The Spotted Pig and The Breslin:

Bloomfield had planned to be a policewoman in Birmingham, England, until she didn’t get her application in on time. Thanks to that bit of tardiness, she instead decided to follow her two sisters into cooking, working her way up the line in restaurants around London. She worked for Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray at London’s River Café and later spent a summer with Alice Waters at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse. But when fellow Brit and River Café alumnus Jamie Oliver recommended her to Friedman, she was still a relative unknown. Her debut at the Spotted Pig drew a lot of attention—not just because of the involvement of Batali and several high-profile investors (Bono and Jay-Z), but because Bloomfield was running a new kind of restaurant that brought together several foodie threads: serious snout-to-tail cooking with a religious adherence to fresh/local/seasonal ingredients, served in a casual atmosphere with a tone of clubby downtown cool. As Anthony Bourdain puts it: “She pretty much wrote the all-time book on how to come from someplace else and make New York love you.”

Bloomfield’s cookbook, A Girl and Her Pig, comes out in 2012, but beyond that and a few odd interviews and TV appearances, she keeps her head in her pots. She’s in the kitchen at the Pig on some nights, the Breslin on most others, and getting the new John Dory Oyster Bar (also in the Ace) ready for opening in early November. She also maintains a food-exchange program with father of head-to-tail eating Fergus Anderson of St. John—they switch spots on occasion to keep up with each other’s shore.

“She’s never worked the room, she’s never played the game,” says Bourdain, “and yet everybody knows who she is—she’s one of the only high-profile chefs who’s almost never on TV, she rarely gives interviews, and every time I walk into the Breslin or the Spotted Pig, I look back there and she’s standing behind the line, actually cooking.”

I haven’t been to The Breslin yet. Sounds like a treat, though.

I’ve never been to a four-star restaurant. Might be fun to try one day if I ever win the lottery.

In the Times, Sam Sifton gives Del Posto, the coveted four-star rating:

GREAT restaurants may start out that way. But an extraordinary restaurant generally develops only over time, the product of prolonged artistic risk and managerial attention. An extraordinary restaurant uses the threat of failure first as a spur to improvement, then as a vision of unimaginable calamity. An extraordinary restaurant can transcend the identity of its owners or chef or concept.

And of course an extraordinary restaurant serves food that leads to gasps and laughter, to serious discussion and demands for more of that, please, now. The point of fine dining is intense pleasure. For the customer, at any rate, an extraordinary restaurant should never be work.

That’s how CC does it, over and over again.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.