Yay! It's the NYT Dining Section!

I really liked this week’s NYT Dining section. Like Frank Bruni’s headline, “Let’s Eat, Not Fuss,” the whole section seemed to have a simple, no-fuss approach. Which is appropriate, given that it was the 26th and we’re all suffering from holiday overload.

- My in-laws are in town and we ate at a diner here in Queens last week called Georgia Diner; we had heard that it had fantastic diner fare. They did. But the coleslaw just looked nasty – lots of dripping mayonnaise – and my mother-in-law and I both passed on it. I told her I knew of an Ina Garten recipe for coleslaw that used olive oil and vinegar instead of mayo. Well, the Dining section corrected my memory; it was a recipe for potato salad, not coleslaw. Whether it’s coleslaw or potato salad, it sounds so much lighter and more elegant made with champagne vinegar than gloppy mayo.

- I’m an egg fanatic. I like them soft-boiled, scrambled (with goat cheese, thank you), fried, poached…pretty much anything but hard-boiled. The thing I like best about making eggs is that they offer infinite possibilities – you can mix just about anything in, you can prepare them a dozen different ways, and they conveniently seem to soak up the flavors of anything you cook them in. So I was enormously pleased to see the recipe for Baked Egg with Proscuitto and Tomato. Sounds simple and delicious, even if the tomato is out of season by about six months. I’ll wait until summer for this one. July never seemed so far away! (Side note: Feeling a little under the weather after a…um…long night of imbibing? The magic cure is a poached egg on top of a piece of lightly buttered toast, with just a dash of salt and pepper. Coupled with Advil and water, it will cure all your ills.)

- Frank Bruni rated the 10 Best New Restaurants in “Let’s Eat, Not Fuss.” And I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had actually been to one of them: Anthos! And I do agree that it’s one of the best I’ve been to in the city. Why am I surprised that I had actually been to one of the restaurants? I’m definitely more a home-cook-type-of-foodie versus the restaurant-type. I don’t usually run in the same circles as Frank Bruni. So it was a surprise that we had actually been to the same place! Why do I have "The Jeffersons" theme song in my head? Hmm…