I hope you’re all having a wonderful day with family and friends.

We’ve had some technical difficulties here for the past few weeks. Between work, travel (for work and personal reasons), and the back-to-back storms here on the East Coast we haven’t had the chance to dedicate a large block of time to diagnosing and fixing the problem.

I did have that chance yesterday and today. I’m happy to report that I seem to have repaired the site (as you can tell). In all fairness . . . → Read More: Back Up and Running]]>

We’ve had some technical difficulties here for the past few weeks. Between work, travel (for work and personal reasons), and the back-to-back storms here on the East Coast we haven’t had the chance to dedicate a large block of time to diagnosing and fixing the problem.

I did have that chance yesterday and today. I’m happy to report that I seem to have repaired the site (as you can tell). In all fairness I’m still not 100% certain what happened… instead I did a lot of backing up and reinstalling. The joys of being your own tech support! But nevermind that now. We’re back up and running!

We are waaaaay behind on posts this summer, but we’ve been digging out from our wedding and honeymoon! More to come, we promise

Right now we are in Minnesota for some family time, and on Saturday night we went to one of our favorite places in Minneapolis (which is, of couse, local / seasonal): Haute Dish (get it?).

Lindsay had the fried chicken and watermelon, which turned out to be a creatively deconstructed . . . → Read More: Eating Local in Minneapolis: Haute Dish]]>

We are waaaaay behind on posts this summer, but we’ve been digging out from our wedding and honeymoon! More to come, we promise

Right now we are in Minnesota for some family time, and on Saturday night we went to one of our favorite places in Minneapolis (which is, of couse, local / seasonal): Haute Dish (get it?).

Lindsay had the fried chicken and watermelon, which turned out to be a creatively deconstructed take on things. The chicken was flattened and rolled like a roulade, one half with leafy greens in the middle and the other half with mac & cheese. After they rolled up the halves they wrapped the skin back around it and fried it. It looked like egg rolls. Very creative, and delicious.

I had the Tatertot Haute Dish, which is a braised short rib with the most amazing tater tots. They are perfectly creamy in the middle and crispy on the outside. Check out their menu, and the food pics on their website. If you’re ever in Minneapolis, give it a try!

The highlight was the “Veggie Patch” appetizer (pictured above). It featured all the late summer veggies prepared very carefully and served on a giant plank. That purple streak is a eggplant reduction of some sort (it was awesome!). We each started on one end and ate our way to the middle. Yum!

Don’t let anyone ever poo-poo sustainable eating by claiming that “you can’t feed the modern world by retreating to 18th . . . → Read More: Our Sentiments Exactly…]]> Here’s a piece published a few days ago by Dan Barber, the mastermind at Blue Hill. Blue Hill is one of the New York restaurants that really helped to open our eyes in terms of sustainable eating, and they have a bigger restaurant, a farm (Stone Barns), and a related education center in Westchester.

Don’t let anyone ever poo-poo sustainable eating by claiming that “you can’t feed the modern world by retreating to 18th century farming practices”. The truth is that it is possible to apply modern knowledge to farming without applying modern chemical and petroleum-based industrial techniques. Sustainable farming has come a long way since pre-industrial farming. To me, the most powerful part of the piece is at the end:

“That’s really brilliant farming… And it’s enormously productive, too. At the height of the last season, Stone Barns produced something like 28,000 pounds of food. That’s off of six and a half vegetable-production acres and 22 acres of pasture. That’s an average of a thousand pounds of food an acre—more than the typical Iowa cornfield, and about 50 times more flavorful. Looking at a giant animal feedlot as the future of agriculture is like looking at an 18th-century factory billowing black smoke and saying, ‘Hey, look how advanced it is.’”

We visited the Tian Tan (“Big”) Buddha on Lantau Island and the Po Lin monastery that built it:

An although it’s half a . . . → Read More: Hong Kong]]> We’re sorry that it’s been so long since our last post, but we we were in Hong Kong! The trip was followed by some technical difficulties (not to mention some sleep difficulties). To make up for the radio silence, here’s a quick wrap-up post on our trip (and the food):

We visited the Tian Tan (“Big”) Buddha on Lantau Island and the Po Lin monastery that built it:

An although it’s half a world away, there was a hyper-local element. They grow and process all their own tea on site:

While there we ate at the monastery’s cantina, which serves a delicious vegetarian meal:

Hong Kong was a British colony up until 1997, and there’s still plenty of evidence, from their double-decker buses to the fact that they drive on the left. One that I really enjoyed while Lindsay was at her conference: high tea at the Intercontinental Hotel (with a nice German beer). We also experienced some bizarrely cloudy (very English) weather, with clouds rolling down the mountainside but not onto the rest of the city:

For a day trip, I visited Macau, which was a Portuguese colony (rather than British) up until 1999. Parts of it feel very Mediterranean. But then you turn a corner and you’re clearly back in China. I had a great Portuguese meal there, which was basically cod, covered in oil and thin slices of garlic (I’d say at least 10 cloves’ worth), and baked. A definite but authentic break from Chinese cuisine.

Here’s a contrast in local vs. not: on a small outlying island that I visited they had freshly caught fish in shallow tanks. That doesn’t sound strange, except they were selling live stingrays, live horseshoe crabs, and live squid the size of my arm! Meanwhile, on the ferry ride back (as well as the ferry to and from Macau), we were literally playing Frogger with massive container ships, one after another. The Pearl River Delta is the largest source of Chinese manufacturing, and I witnessed that first hand. We passed the port at Hong Kong on our ride from the airport, and it is massive, making Long Beach, CA and Elizabeth, NJ look like jokes.

The day that we left, Lindsay and I ate breakfast at the grand Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon. It used to be located next to the terminus of the railroad which brought people from Paris, across Europe, to Moscow and then mainland China (until the terminus was moved). The hotel serves a wonderful breakfast in its regal lobby, with full sterling silver service, and the poached eggs were perfect! I still can’t get them that neat and perfect free-form (so I use those silicon cups):

None of this even touches on the terrific dinners that we had while there. We ate a lot of Cantonese food (appropriately) but also some tremendous French and “fusion” food as well. The hands-down winner, in both our opinions, was the restaurant Hutong. (Apologies for the horribly annoying website if you choose to click.) The food was terrific and the view of the Hong Kong skyline was unbeatable. It’s on the 28th floor across the bay, and it was one of the few truly clear days!

(1) We moved to Somerville, MA (greater Boston area). We’re still getting settled in and figuring out the local food scene, but we’re loving it so far. We signed up for a winter CSA with Red Fire Farm, so we’ll post on that every other week when we get our share.

(2) We’re engaged! There won’t be much about all that on the blog, but it . . . → Read More: We’re back!]]> We’ve had a few changes over the last month…

(1) We moved to Somerville, MA (greater Boston area). We’re still getting settled in and figuring out the local food scene, but we’re loving it so far. We signed up for a winter CSA with Red Fire Farm, so we’ll post on that every other week when we get our share.

(2) We’re engaged! There won’t be much about all that on the blog, but it is another reason we’ve been delinquent.

Our next CSA pick-up is tomorrow, so expect more then. We’ll get back to regular blogging, I promise!

The Brooklyn Kitchen is one of two favorite stores for all things kitchen-related. They also offer in-depth culinary classes, some in conjunction with their in-house butcher shop, The Meat Hook. If you are a cook in NYC you probably know them already.

However, you might not be on their mailing list. Today they sent out their monthly class schedule, full of joke classes for April.

The listings ranged from survivalist:

Today is, however, a great excuse . . . → Read More: I Love Pi(e)!]]> In case you didn’t know, today is Pi Day! Pi equals 3.14 blah blah blah, so this fantastic number is celebrated on March 14th. It’s a pretty awesome thing – it can’t be expressed as a ratio of two integers, it goes on forever, and never repeats. If you’re intriged, read The Joy of Pi, but this is a food blog, so I’ll keep my math-nerdy excitement to myself.

Today is, however, a great excuse to eat PIE! Make pizza or bake a pie. We made 4 (yes, 4. Don’t judge.) pizzas with my cousins and their two-year-old this weekend and then ate our way through a peach pie made with pie filling we canned this summer. I love this holiday.

Lindsay and I want to thank her brother, Charlie, for designing both our original logo (v1.0), and our new and improved logo (v2.0).

When we decided to start this blog we gave him a few thoughts and sample images with styles that we liked. Our initial thoughts were limited to what, in retrospect, is really “font-art” (e.g., Google’s ever-changing images that all depict the word “Google”). We weren’t really thinking about a real “logo”.