Continuing what I began yesterday … Breakfast: Coffee, apple Lunch: pre-packaged vegan/macrobiotic dumplings sauteed with fresh carrots, cabbage, olive oil, cashews and clementine oranges Snack: fresh celery/carrot/beat/ginger juice, Raw Revolution bar, small soy latte Dinner: miso soup, salad, teriyaki tofu with brown rice from the place that used to be Wasabi on Bedford Ave (not [...]

Rooftop Farms co-founder Annie Novak will participating in EDIBLE ESTATES: Attack on the Front Lawn, a conversation about growing food in public spaces on Thursday, April 8th at WNYC’s The Greene Space.  [44 Charlton Street (at Varick Street)] For EDIBLE ESTATES: Attack on the Front Lawn, Annie will be joined by Manhattan Borough President Scott [...]

While I’ve still been eating healthier lately than I ever have in my life, I’ve found myself slipping a bit, making too many allowances for just a bit of cheese, a little dairy, a drunkenly-consumed hamburger. To curb this before it gets out of control and I fall back on thinking Triscuits with Laughing Cow [...]

So Niels Windfeld Lund, aka The Bib Professor, is visiting New York for a conference and asked your Brooklyn Home Companion bloggers here if we would support him organizing an overalls party in Greenpoint while he’s in town. Of course! This is the kind of just-random-enough-to-be-fun endeavor we fully support. So, if you happen to [...]

Lots of food policy, agriculture news this week: * Pittsburgh considers reining in urban agriculture, beekeeping and chicken raising. Says the mayor’s spokesperson, “Anytime you see something growing and expanding and there are no rules, you need to regulate it.” Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear …(but darling for the way she manages [...]

Cafe Royal: It is adorable. It is owned by Cody Utzman, the same guy who owns Brooklyn Standard & Papacitos. It has coffee/tea/pastries now, and plans on alcohol and light food in the future (for now, you can bring in sandwiches from Brooklyn Standard across the street). It is, like, 4 blocks from my house. [...]

Cobra Pate featured on Greenpoint Food Market blog: What the hell is cobra pate? Awesome sauce for your next ninja bedtime love fiesta. How’d you come up with the name? The Goddamn Cobras’ hot films don’t make themseles – this is our preferred fuel source. Why the decision to share your product at GFM? Why [...]

Margaret Wheeler Johnson at Double X asks who the hell has time to bake their own bread? The question that occurred to me reading every one of these pieces is how anyone trying to succeed in New York or a similarly pricey and competitive cosmopolis finds the time or reason to engage in elaborate culinary [...]

Attended Work It Brooklyn at the Arsenal last night, and was amazed by the variety of freelancers, artists and entrepreneurs there. During the “speed networking” round, I think I volunteered to paint Brooklyn roofs white this spring; promised to introduce a guy who wants to make a Japanese travel show to an acquaintance of mine [...]

All right, there’s really not that much snow on the ground here in North Brooklyn. I just want to bond with my DC friends who keep twittering about it, okay? I want a shared cultural moment and, dammit, the weather just won’t cooperate! Nonetheless. You should come out this weekend to: 1) The Love Party [...]

I suppose that I would be immediately outed as a witch during the Salem Witch trials of yore. I make secret brew in my house, write lusty plays about circus folk, and find myself enamored of both intentional communities & the magic of Apple computers. Mostly, I am just freakishly tall. Yet, after being stranded [...]

… and they’ve got a cooking show featuring raw nut pate and deserts here: [vimeo 5663331]

Via Joann, the Unhappy Hipsters tumblr:  Dwell magazine images re-captioned. This is my favorite:  Lying on his back, watching the passing clouds, he worried over the Nathaniel Hawthorne lookalike’s role in this grim threesome. Also via Joann, Radish, a “seasonally prepared foods” store, is set to open this spring on Bedford Ave, in the storefront [...]

We’ve been watching a lot of westerns around the home lately, a side-effect of the winter, and also of secret plans. It lends itself to a need for snack food, and tonight I made the best western-watching snack food ever, so I’m going to share it with you. Rosemary White Bean Dip: 1 can white [...]

Reading Craven Maven’s blog is worse than watching the Home Shopping Network when you’re home sick from work and have just downed too much Nyquil. Craven Maven – aka Saer – writes primarily about food and design, in posts heavy with photos. And I want to own (or eat) everything she posts. Just last week, [...]

Had the pleasure of listening to a band called Bow Ribbons at Monkey Town Tuesday night. They only played two songs, because they were sharing the evening with Jolie Holland, Mike Wexler, Garrett Devoe and others (in what Monkey Town described as “a night of medieval sonic drone guitar rock, fiddle, folk-pop and expert percussion”) [...]

Oh monday. Time to shower for the week and scrape off the weekend’s transgressions. It is a running joke [true fact!] in our household that I am adverse to bathing and often daydream my time traveling back to the Court of Versailles. Lazily rubbing my gloved hands with fleur d’oranger and peppering fires with newly [...]

• Brooklyn’s Backyard Chicken Keepers from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo. Meet Megan Paska and Katrina Mauro both Mother Hens to four curious egg-laying chickens in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. They decided to raise chickens for the first time in their tiny urban backyard as a way to live more sustainably. What they discovered is that raising chickens is [...]

After trips to tropical islands (Katie) and the suburbs of Cincy, OH (me), we are once against nestled in cozily in our over-heated, now-crowded-with-Christmas-presents Greenpoint home. And we intend to hibernate. I mean, we are, in fact, at this moment, hibernating. I don’t think Katie has left the house in 48 hours; I did go [...]

I don’t realize I’m rambling about varieties of winter squash until I notice people staring at me, bored or confused. Lovely story from the Atlantic Food Channel about a writer returning to the city after a few months as a farm intern. This is more and more something I think I need to do …

“What the hell is that? What are you doing out there?” A confused friend asked me this during a recent visit to our home. To which I proudly puffed out my chest and said, “This is our Compost Pile.” Oh yeah, we buy our produce at farmers’ markets, carry canvas bags everywhere, and reuse our [...]

Welcome, class! This will be the first of many Friday “Home Economics Lessons,” links to the random cooking-, farming-, dancing-, creating- and Brooklyn-spectacularity-related things we’ve been reading about throughout the week. Let’s begin with this article in Bust magazine, via Stem + Leaf, about the history of home economics. Writer Emily McCombs notes, “From feminist [...]

We are [sometimes] zealous supporters of exercise. My body is my temple. My church. My ashram. My christian science meeting hall. In cold weather, the thought of traveling to a fitness center seems arduous. And the treadmills. Well, they donʼt seem to go anywhere, do they? I could chase after boys. I could set my alarm [...]

Julie Powell, of Julie and Julia fame, talks with Double X’s Hanna Rosin about what seems to be the hobby trend of the moment (and is also the focus of her new book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession): butchery. The first proper butcher shop I ever came to know was Ottomanelli’s, on [...]

Soaking the oats couldn’t be easier. You literally just put them in a jar (1 1/2 cups of dry oats makes about 3 servings), and fill the jar with water to a level just above the dry oats. Then you let it sit overnight.