The stuff of life.

The cover of the latest issue of Gourmet features a drool-worthy pile of freshly baked rolls - salty topknots, yeasty fantails, sesame-encrusted whole wheat...you name it, it's there. I could practically smell the yeasty goodness rising off of the page. How could I resist trying out at least one of the recipes?

So, last Sunday, before I headed out to do my laundry, I whipped up the dough for a batch of buttermilk fantail rolls (using the buttermilk I'd picked up on my Saturday outing). I picked the fantails because they seemed like the easiest for a novice bread-maker like myself (and because they were so gosh-darned purty).

They really were remarkably easy to make - you let the yeast ferment a bit with some warm water and sugar (I used some of the turbinado sugar I keep on hand for my coffee), add in the butter, flour, buttermilk and salt, and then knead the resulting dough for a few minutes before setting it aside to rise.

After about two hours or so, you punch down the dough and roll it out in two batches, slice the dough into strips, stack 'em, and cut crosswise to make the fantail shapes. Slap those babies into buttered muffin cups, let them do the second rise, and then bake. Enjoy the smell of baking bread for the next twenty minutes, then take your pan out. Brush them with butter straight out of the oven, and ten minutes later, you've got rolls.

My oven is a bit tricky, and I probably need to adjust the cooking temperature down just a bit, so they bake a bit more slowly and end up tinged golden and brown rather than brown and darker brown - but they still tasted dang good with the salad I had for dinner (and with lunch the next day).

Like the corners of my mind.

See that, right there? That's a dish of baeckeoffe and a green salad, from my trip to Strasbourg in 2006. Louisa's making baeckeoffe tonight, and now I'm nostalgic. I can almost taste the tender, brothy potatoes and the knuckly portions of beef, all braised in slightly sweet Alsatian wine. Sigh.

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!

Don't do this if you want them to say "I do."

February's issue of Gourmet has a useful and ultimately hilarious article about making romantic gestures - proposals of marriage or otherwise - in restaurants. It starts off as a what not to do list, and ends up with some great stories of proposals gone horribly, horribly awry - and some that went well, too!

Classic, tongue-in-cheek example of why Gourmet is one of my favorite food mags.

UPDATE: I found the article - click away!

Image courtesy of rmrayner on Flickr. Some people lust after diamond solitaires; I prefer sapphires.

The making of four lunches.

Kitchen Lust: Vintage glassware.

If I had more cabinet space, one of the first things I'd invest in would be a collection of vintage glassware. Wine glasses, water goblets, champagne coupes (the ones above are available right now on Etsy) - you name it, I'd take it off your hands.

My ultimate goal? A motley yet curated collection that wouldn't look out of place on the best Parisian flea market tables.

Want to do what I can't? Go ahead and search Etsy and eBay, and don't tell me what you find. I'll just be too jealous.

A resolution I'm hoping to keep.

Buying lunch in midtown Manhattan is really, really expensive. The cheapest lunches, which can be had from street carts, are usually about $5.00. If you want something with vegetables - say, a salad - you're talking more like $10 or $11. Multiply that by five days a week, fifty weeks a year, and we're talking $3,000. THREE GRAND!

So, I have resolved to bring my lunch to work with me at least three times per week. On Fridays, my office provides a free lunch at the (pretty darn decent) cafeteria, and I figure leaving myself one day a week of purchased lunch is probably the most realistic goal.

I've kicked things off this weekend, cooking a bunch of dishes that will keep well in the fridge over the course of the week. I also bought three high-end Tupperware-type thingies with supposedly leak-proof seals.

This week's menu: roasted tomato soup, coq au vin, roasted shrimp with orzo, celery remoulade, and cabbage salad. Might also throw in some brussels sprouts at some point, too. I mean, just because I'm brown bagging it doesn't mean I need to eat cold cuts and carrot sticks all week, right?