I hope that it is a sign of potential energy, of a creative mind at rest just before a burst of activity, that lately I have trouble finishing the things I start. I fear, of course, that it’s a sign of laziness, fecklessness, lack of commitment and aversion to hard work, or, even worse, a sign that the older I get, the harder it is to bounce back from a bad day at LuthorCorp, and eventually I’ll just run out of juice and be fit only for trawling my archives and remembering a time when I could actually string a set of ideas together. Such thoughts, though, seem churlish and unseemly on a cold sunny Easter Sunday, a day which should be about renewal, not about bitching about one’s job. I will try to cast my lot with the quiet-before-the-storm, dear friends. 
Nonetheless, I do realize that many of you have been patient with me, waiting for me to finally bring all the russenzopf information together into one concise post. I need to write that concise post, and to finish the tale of our long, long march around Washington (the short version is that the Folger Library doesn’t *look* like a long walk from the Washington Monument...). Once upon a time, I promised the Pie Queen that I would revisit the sourdough tutorial by building a new set of starters. I even seem to remember starting a meme for which Cara tagged me, at my request. A peek at my knitting projects would horrify anyone who believes that you pick a project and stick to it until it is done: here is my Michael Kors sweater, waiting patiently until my fury at having to rip back seven inches of the front passes; here is the silk scarf I cast on on the plane in Washington (in fairness, I’m almost finished with it); here is the bathmat I started on my lunch hour last Tuesday (I’m almost done with that one, too); here is the sock I almost finished, tried on, decided I would try it on again when I hated my ankles a little less; here is the afghan I knit when I’m sick of cables or lace, and need something simple: decompression knitting. With all this work left undone, there is only one appropriate course of action: I’m going to play the Five Questions meme, answering questions posed to me by my legal advisor and very dear friend, the man we call ‘mouse. (If you would like to play this game, please leave me a comment indicating such. I will send you five questions via email, to be answered on your blog at your leisure. And do be sure to check out ‘mouse’s answers to the questions posed to him by the magnificent Bunni. He’s good at this game, ‘mouse.)
1) Which part of a man is your biggest turn-on / what do you check out?
It feels like such a cliche to mention eyes, but yes, I’m a sucker for a sweet set of eyes. It’s not that I’m impervious to other features, and I’ll never look away from a fellow who has a perfectly V-shaped back or finely-muscled legs, but it’s always the eyes that dissolve me into a puddle of longing—or not, if the chemistry isn’t right. One of my favorite forms of boy-watching, both in my younger, wilder days and my older, more sedate, looking-but-not-touching days, is to watch men play pool. I have a theory that playing pool is the best thing that men can do for themselves, simply because very few men don’t look great when they play pool. I just love the expression on the face of a man lining up a shot. That expression of concentration, of intense focus on a fixed point, is irresistable to me.
Admittedly, I do take a peek at hands, too, for reasons I will not disclose. (No, it has nothing to do with genital size. Sorry, all you miscreants out there.
2) When played as a child, what animal were you?
Very often I was a cat, simply because I thought my imitation of a cat meowing was really good. It certainly wasn’t because I was agile, because I certainly wasn’t. I did go through a phase when I was about six or seven where I was a mongoose. I’d had a little bit of a snake phobia; then I read “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” by Rudyard Kipling and thought that any animal that could kill cobras, defend their adoptive human family from said cobras, and defend their home until no cobra would dare breach it, was my kind of animal. I don’t know why I was so fixated on cobras, considering that I lived at least 8,000 miles away from the nearest cobra. I was a weird little kid, which, I’m sure, comes as no shock to anyone.
3) If you had to give up one of your senses, which would it be?
Oh, now this is a scary one, as I’m sort of attached to all my senses, but if I were compelled to give one up, well...losing taste is awful to contemplate. It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while I fall into a slump where food doesn’t taste as good as it usually does, and when it happens, it fills me with despair. (When the slump passes, and food tastes like food again, it cheers me in a singular way.) I don’t want to lose the sense of smell, either, simply because smell and taste go hand in hand; when you lose your sense of smell, you lose your sense of taste, too. Of course, that’s not the only reason I love the sense of smell; it’s a beauty on its own merits. (As I type this, I have a bag by my chair full of goodies from the tearoom at which I spent the afternoon with Bunni. I came home with little packets of this, this, this and this. From time to time I pick one up, open it and inhale. Oh, mercy, but these are wonderful.)
Moving right along...I could not do without my sense of touch. It determines when my bread doughs need more water. It provides a consistent source of wonder every time I stick my hands into a bowl of soaked flaxseeds. It teaches me all about yarn, from tough, wiry jute to butter-soft wool. And, of course, it provides me with a few thousand other pleasures from receiving a really good back scratch to kissing Lloyd’s eyebrows when we wake up in the morning (I think he finds it a little weird that I like to do this, but he plays along gamely, which is a good thing for me, because I really love how his eyebrows feel) to the sort of touching about which you probably do not need me to share. That just leaves sight and sound, which once would have been a draw, with sight possibly edging out sound because I really love to read, and not everything I love to read is available in an audio version. Then in 2005, Snow taught me how to knit, and introduced me to the thrill of finding a colorway with your name written all over it. Nope, it’s not a draw anymore. If I had to give anything up, it would be hearing. Having said that, as I write this I’m listening to Jarvis Cocker singing “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time,” and I don’t think I’m interested in a universe where I can’t hear Jarvis, or Bach, or Lil Johnson or Squeeze or Paul Motian. ‘mouse, can I stop answering this question now? (breathes into paper bag)
4) At the bar, “Can I buy you a drink?” What will you order?
Why, I think I’ll take you up on that, thank you, especially since my nerves are all jangled from the previous question. 
All kidding aside, I would be ordering a vodka gimlet. Now as ever, I am a fool for limes, and a vodka gimlet, being just vodka and Rose’s Lime Juice, satisfies that particular sweet-and-sour tooth of mine nicely. Sometimes, depending on the hour of the night, I might opt for brandy (Armagnac or Calvados, please), or bourbon on the rocks, and last weekend in Washington I had a Bombay Sapphire martini as a nightcap—which was probably unwise as I’d already had wine with dinner and Calvados with dessert—but for the most part, I am loyal to my friend the vodka gimlet. Once upon a time I read some magazine that said that the vodka gimlet was the up-and-coming “hot” cocktail, the Cosmopolitan of 2004 or something like that, and I was leery about ordering them, lest I give the appearance of joining a herd mentality. Then I decided that the only thing sillier than ordering a drink because it was trendy was not ordering the drink you really want, simply because it’s trendy.
A postscript: Once upon a time I ordered a vodka gimlet at a bar where the bartender eschewed Rose’s Lime Juice, preferring instead to use a mixture of freshly-squeezed lime juice and simple syrup. For the life of me, I can’t remember where I had this. It has become my lost chord, the best gimlet I ever had, and I’ll never be able to find it again. Damn.
5) You and I have two hours together in NYC and it’s the only time we’ll ever see each other in person—where do we go that shows me something NY and reveals the most about you?
Without a doubt, we’d go skinnydipping in the Central Park reservoir. No, no, we wouldn’t. I was just making a cheap joke. Sorry, everyone. (Mom, please stop weeping and wondering where you went wrong.) When I first read this question, my mind seized up with a few hundred possibilities, an embarrassment of riches, all compelling, all informative, all fun, but none of which quite hit the mark. The easy and obvious choice would be a food crawl, but where? The neighborhood in which I live, beautiful uptown Astoria, Queens, where Lloyd and I moved on the strength of the bagel shop alone? The Lower East Side, where I used to live, and where I still prowl for pierogi, sable, pickles and the best, most affordable dried fruit and chocolate in the city at Economy Candy? There are other neighborhoods in which to do this, too: Chinatown, Flushing, Sunset Park, Arthur Avenue in the Bronx neighborhood of Belmont, Ninth Avenue behind Port Authority (where the African groceries are located), Carroll Gardens, the entire length of the 7 line in Queens (where you can get a fresh arepa and a French pastry within blocks of each other)...I couldn’t even begin to pick one. I tried a different tack: Does it necessarily *have* to be about food? Why not go up to the Heather Garden at Fort Tryon Park, my favorite park in the city? Or why not go to the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows Park to visit the Panorama of the City of New York, one of my favorite hidden treasures in the city, which never fails to elicit a “wow” from anyone who has come to visit it with me? These are both fine options, but they do tend to require a fair amount of subway time, which would cut into our overall two-hour window, and they wouldn’t quite satisfy the terms of ‘mouse’s question, at least to me. (That said, if we went to the Panorama, we could stop at The Lemon Ice King of Corona on the way back to the 7. It would be a shame to miss that.)
Because I’ve never found a question I can’t overthink, I continued to ponder options: The New York Public Library? The Museum of the City of New York? The Frick Collection? The coffeehouse in Astoria where I knit on Thursday nights? The coffeehouse on the Upper East Side, across the street from Bunni’s apartment, where I spend a lot of time these days? It was at that moment that the answer came to me—no, it didn’t come to me. It bonked me on the head, much like the apple that bonked the head of Sir Isaac Newton. (Disclaimer: I am not comparing myself to Sir Isaac Newton.) Dear ‘mouse, where do we go that shows you something NY and reveals the most about me?
We go here.
Kitchen Arts and Letters is famous in food-industry circles for being a source of rare, out-of-print, cutting-edge food and wine books and periodicals, and they do a lot of business with chefs, bakers, cake decorators, caterers and food writers. In describing the store and its staff in these terms, though, I worry that I’m making it sound like a rarified, snobbier-than-thou shop, when it is the very opposite of such a thing. I visited Kitchen Arts for the first time in 1994, having read both Ed Levine’s laudatory comments about the store in the first edition of New York Eats, and Laurie Colwin’s essay “The Case of the Mysterious Flatbread” in More Home Cooking, in which she mentions ordering Rotis and Naans of India by Purobi Babbar from Kitchen Arts. (Of course I have my own copy of Rotis and Naans of India, which, again, I’m sure comes as a shock to nobody.) I was a little nervous going in, wondering if I would find that scary cheffy vibe inside its walls. I asked the guy at the counter if they carried a certain book by Jane Grigson; he replied, cheerfully, “have you seen our Elizabeth David/Jane Grigson shelf yet?”, and I knew that I had come to the right place. The guy behind the counter was the store manager, Matt, and he has become a good friend and a font of valuable insight and information, as has Nach, the store owner, and the team of shop assistants who have worked there over the years, who return often to visit.
It is hard to sum up just what a resource this store is for people who like to cook or bake, or who like to read about food. (My favorite story comes from Nigella Lawson in How to Eat, in which she writes about going out to dinner in London, having a bit of wine with dinner, returning home after the shops in London are closed but the ones in New York are still open, calling Kitchen Arts and asking Nach or Matt, “what new things have you received that I might like?”; a month later, a big box—and a big credit card bill—arrives at her doorstep. Needless to say, the Kitchen Arts staff likes her a lot.) It’s a little easier—but not much—to describe just what an effect this store, and the people who work in it, have had on my cookery and my knowledge base about food. I am sitting in the lumpy uncomfortable chair in the living room, surrounded by books. Casting my eye over the stacks on the shelves and the stacks on the floor, I mentally tick off the number of books that came to me from Kitchen Arts and realize, to my shock, that I have lost count at 45. All of my Nigel Slater books, all of my Karen Hess books, all of my Pierre Herme books, Loving and Cooking with Reckless Abandon by Kevin Gould, Artisan Baking Across America by Maggie Glezer, the Oxford Companion to Food, my falling-apart copy of Growing Up on the Chocolate Diet by Lora Brody, the updated edition of On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, a facsimile edition of The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened, all of these came from Kitchen Arts, and we haven’t even left the living room, haven’t begun to peruse the bookshelves in the kitchen. When I won the Egg Board fellowship in 2004, I came to Kitchen Arts to ask Nach if there were any particular resources I should pursue—the amount of information Nach holds at the tips of his fingers is nothing short of awe-inspiring—and he was so tickled by the the theme of my book-to-be that he talked to me about it for nearly two hours, pausing only to ring up customer purchases and take a phone call from a writer at Saveur. He still asks me how the book is coming along. Since I don’t have the nerve to tell him that I stopped working on it last year, I guess I have only one option: I need to start writing it again.
So, dear ‘mouse, if you really only had two hours in New York, I would take you to Kitchen Arts and Letters. While we’re there, you might meet a writer or two, a student in culinary school looking to purchase his first Escoffier, a line cook looking for the new Peter Gordon cookbook on his boss’s recommendation, a father looking for a good basic cookbook for his recently-graduated-from-college children, a home cook interested in learning how to cook grass-fed beef properly, another home cook who cut her teeth on Laurie Colwin and wants her own copy of Rotis and Naans of India. (You might also meet a cluster of browsers who look at the new arrivals table and announce that they just get their shopping ideas here, but they’re going to buy the books on Amazon so they can get the discount. Try not to flick them, quickly but painfully, on the back of the head.) You will see thousands of books: cheffy books, non-cheffy books, baking books, books exclusively about wine and spirits, travelogues in which food plays a key role, 18th, 19th and 20th century cookbooks in facsimile, household management guides, books on how to start a food business and how to calculate and improve your profit margins. You will see Nach and Matt and at least one other shop assistant, all of whom are skilled at asking you where your interests lie and then recommending at least five nifty, off-the-beaten-path books—or five frontlist books that you might have passed by. You would definitely find me in conversation with Matt, who starts all of our conversations with “Was this here the last time you were in?,” and then hands me a stack of baking books from the U.K., or the new book about eggs by Michel Roux, or a history of large-scale agriculture in California, or something new from Nigel Slater or Simon Hopkinson. I protest prettily, “oh, I have to make some decisions here, because I just can’t buy all of these,” and Matt plays along gamely, simply because he knows that whatever doesn’t come home with me today will haunt me for a week, or a month, or two months, until I finally return and cry “Okay, I’ll take it!” and Matt says, “I had the feeling you would, eventually.”
Then we would head to a bar—two blocks east of Kitchen Arts, the neighborhood is full of ‘em—and I would explain to you, over a couple of vodka gimlets, why you really, really need more than two hours in New York.
Happy Easter, dear friends. Wishing you blooming daffodils and a spring without frost.