Girl time.

My friend Miya invited me to hit the Greenmarket with her on Saturday - her husband Jordan is a med student and was on call starting at 7 AM, so she was up and ready to get moving bright and early. Since I hadn't been to the market since before Christmas (and since I don't see Miya nearly often enough), I took her up on it.

We met up at Barnes & Noble around 11:45 (I was running a shameful 15 minutes late - sorry, Miya!) and made a fairly quick tour of the wintertime stands - lots of apples (probably mealy, sadly), gorgeous eggs at Knoll's Crest (I bought half a dozen brown), onions, celery root, jewel-like jams - and dairy. I bought a quart of fresh buttermilk (more on its fate soon) at the Tonje Farms stand, and, eventually, we found ourselves in front of Ronnybrook.

Normally, I pick up some farmer's cheese at Ronnybrook, or maybe a coffee milk for the road. But on Saturday, they were serving hot chocolate with fresh whipped cream. (Right next to a stack of sweet compound butters, such as cinammon toast butter, yum.) The whipped cream was ivory in color - full of rich, delicious butterfat, and the hot chocolate was all-American, as much milky as chocolatey. So good.

For lunch, we hit Republic, a noodle bar on Union Square East. More on our delicious Japanese eggplant and various adventures in noodles in a forthcoming post!