I know what you’re thinking.

["She misspelled the title of this post. Should I tell her?"]

I meant to put ‘gournet’ in the title–and not because this post concerns the fish of the family Triglidae (though there are fish. Shiny ones.)

A few weeks ago, my friend Dan and I galloped off to Chinatown to see his noodle dealer. I can’t show you the noodle dealer, of course, but perhaps you can ferret out the location with the background clues.

We bought five packets of beautiful, fresh noodles.

Then, a new vegetable enthusiast friend (who sets up shop on the street) gleefully packed mounds of long Chinese greens and baby bok choy for us in lucky red bags, throwing in extra handfuls for good measure–so many that the bags weighed us down as we made our way toward the fish.

I like shiny things. So unsurprisingly, the fish that caught my eye were pink and shimmery.

Scaled and gutted, the pink fish still sparkled in my kitchen a few hours later;

while Dan stirred his wonderful black bean sauce into the noodles, and we sautéed the greens, I whipped egg whites and salt to create a crust that baked around the fish.

By then, our guests had started to arrive: Dan’s sister, who lives in the neighborhood, and then my friends LJ, Sarah, Tricia, David (who lives in Mexico City), Mario, Revaz, and Dean.

Dan, who is a gluten-free chef, made sizzling parsnip cakes with Chinese sausage as everyone shed coats and boots, and we began to celebrate The Year of the Rabbit together.

Looking at our birth years on the Chinese calendar, we read the Engrish predictions for our year ahead as I portioned out pieces of the whole fish.

In years past, my favorite part of Chinese New Year parties has been making fortune cookies with my friend Mica, but this year I decided to finally make tea eggs.

Boiled hard, the eggshells are cracked and the eggs simmered with 5-spice powder and tea bags, then cure for up to a few days, chilled.

Just after the eggs were Dan’s lovely individual chocolate cakes (recipe), Tricia’s pistachio macarons from Michael Allen, and raucous revelry, but before that, the kitchen went silent for a few minutes, as we unpeeled the marbled eggs and considered the possibilities in the months ahead…

Image courtesy Fred Truman.

This fall, I was fortunate to be able to have a class of smart graduate students at NYU’s ITP think through community interactions during our fourteen weeks together. (You can see our syllabus for “communitp” and go through our blog archive and Twitter account for more details.)

At the conclusion of class, I invited them over for dinner (to be precise, they asked, and I was delighted to cook for all of us).

Thinking about appropriate holiday food, I asked for dietary restrictions and allergies, so as to honor those, and was reminded that one of the students is vegan.

What often surprises me is how cooks feel they need to craft entirely separate menus for those with specific food preferences.

I found myself thinking about foods that are green and warming—and I formed a menu around inclusion, starting with the simple roasted tomatillo salsa (roast skinned, chopped tomatillos for 20 minutes at 425 degrees F) that I served with chips and traditional guacamole when they arrived.

I had roasted sliced fractal cauliflower (we discussed the science behind communities in class),

in between stirring crushed red pepper and minced garlic into chopped parsley for a chimichurri sauce.

Nothing builds happy communities at the table like garlic, I’ve found in intensive research.

And I roasted coins of purple carrots and halved brussels sprouts while the roasted green spelt (freekeh) bubbled and softened on top of the stove.

Everything was vegan (good oil is all you need to roast veg and stir into drained grains), except the seared pork shoulder that I had let burnish slowly for six hours during the day before pulling it apart and setting it aside.

When we could all be persuaded to pause just long enough to claim seats around the table, those of us who eat meat stirred little bits into the freekeh with roasted veg and chimichurri. In 2011, consider making meat optional and a condiment—you’ll find it liberating. For those of you worried about protein, whole grains like freekeh and quinoa are excellent choices.

We were too busy toasting and talking about the upcoming ITP Winter Show (which was great) for me to take pictures,

but we agreed it was a lovely way to finish the semester over dessert: my homemade brandied prune plums spooned over bourbon gelato, vanilla ice cream, and ginger sorbet.

Thank you again to the seven who made it to dinner, and to all fourteen of you who inspired me to think and work on community in new ways. I miss our class meetings already…

With all the fun of December, Thanksgiving photos never quite made it up here. It’s a little late, but shall we?

I made my usual early start (5 a.m.) to cook down the list, pausing for a moment before I made the smashed potatoes in early afternoon.

Knowing I am mostly finished by that point, I always feel comforted. The clabbered milk (add a squeeze of lemon to whole milk and let it sit for five minutes to create buttermilk) I poured from a Mason jar went in before the butter to finish the dish.

My friend Tricia took some wonderful shots of the side dishes after she arrived with Kenyatta–

Image by Tricia Wang

and I’m relying on her images as our guest list grew from six the day before to fourteen an hour before (someone sat on a camping chair and some of us ate on palm leaf plates!), so I was slightly distracted.

There were roasted butternut squash and local apples with pepitas for crunch and sage:

Image by Tricia Wang

Also roasted brussel sprouts and pears with ginger and lemon zest–I’m very interested in combining fruits and veg with a dominant spice or herb in side dishes lately:

Image by Tricia Wang

If memory serves, a carrot-top pesto went on roasted cauliflower, I improvised a chard-quinoa dish, the usual cranberry-orange sauce was chilled, and everyone raved over the Thomas Keller leek bread pudding.

The turkey I did remember to document, as I want to remember this seventeen-pound beaut from Di Paolo at the Grand Army Farmers’ Market. This is a salt brine, oil rub, and little else that took about three hours in the oven:

For the dramatic dessert presentations, Kevin’s mother unmolded her tiramisu,

that we shared responsibility for whipping heavy cream for that she spread on top and sprinkled with chocolate chips before slicing.

And Francis, who is my good friend Solana’s cousin and a fabulous cook (it runs in their family),

cut into her two derby pies. I had a very hard time deciding whether I liked the traditional or the chocolate, and insisted on keeping the tiny remainder of one pie. We completed the bourbon theme with small-batch versions of bourbon vanilla gelato and of the spirit itself.

I looked around the crowded table at friends (I like this shot of Bre and Kio) and extended family,

laughing and learning about living in New York and I took notes from Linda on standing your ground as a feminist.

But the biggest lesson I learned this year (and I think it was Solana who articulated it best) is this: it takes generations eating together to make it truly feel like Thanksgiving.

For all recipes, see my Thanksgiving primer post.

When I discovered on Wednesday that my friends Jonas and Dave were both in town, it seemed such a good occasion for having friends over for brunch on Saturday (above: Chrysanthe, Dave, Alex, Jonas, Winnie). Tricia, Audrey, Kenyatta, Kevin, Chris, Tarikh also filled the kitchen, and we celebrated the turn toward winter with warming foods:

Clockwise from left: roasted brussel sprouts (roast at 425 degrees for twenty minutes tossed with 1 tbsp olive oil, stir in a little harissa), baby kale salad (cut off very ends of kale stems, massage leaves with salt, add sherry vinegar), croissant pudding, roasted fingerling potatoes from Evolutionary Organics (halve and roast at 425 degrees for thirty minutes) with homemade aioli, and crab-fennel-cauliflower salad.

I also made chicken pot pie and a white bean-tomato-kale soup, and Chrysanthe brought a lovely pear-apple crisp.

And with this sort of food on our side and wonderful friends like these, perhaps we shall weather these colder temperatures after all…

On Thursday, to celebrate the last warm day of the season, I convinced Tricia, Dan, and Tarikh to picnic with me in Brooklyn’s Ft. Greene Park.

Tricia sparkled with her wonderful energy as we walked through the crunching leaves,

and met Dan at the monument, where he was waiting with his usual delicious food—

this time, veg sushi with a brilliant dipping sauce (that I sneaked extra spoonfuls of).

Tarikh biked off to find a corkscrew, and we unwrapped my picnic supplies for the occasion: quinoa with squash and harissa, rice noodles with pea shoots and mung bean sprouts tossed with the Momofuku ginger-scallion sauce, which shared plate space next to Dan’s hand-rolled sushi.

It was a day to savor and to wrest the final dregs of summer sunshine, but also a day to embrace new skills—

I am happy to note that all of our picnic was gluten-free (gfree, in common parlance) food, a personal goal for me since I met Dan this spring and learned about his impressive food that is within these parameters.

And we all embraced taking a few hours away from work in the afternoon, to laugh and talk about what the rest of the year might bring… (prediction: likely some wonderful things for these talented three friends of mine…)