I like the Bittman article. First of all, though I'm sure there is lots of very good pizza in New York, it's not particularly easy to find, is sometimes very expensive, and is often a bit of a hassle to get to and get depending on where you live. I lived there for six years, and only ate really good pizza 2 or 3 times because I lived on the Upper West Side - rather a long distance from anywhere worth eating. I ate at Sal and Carmine's a few times (though I never quite got the hype, it was tasty), and went to Di Fara once (again, good, but between the 1.5 hour public transit, the 1 hour wait, and the $5 slice, really not worth it for me). And many of the other well-regarded places were either too much work to get into or too expensive for me to really consider or, more likely, simply too far away from me.

I did eat an awful lot of bad to mediocre pizza in New York.

But what I love about the article is not the recipe (which I think would end up at least 60% hydration because if you follow the directions you'll add water until it comes together), but the easy-going flexible nature of it. I am not a serious pizza maker. I don't own a baking steel or a kettle pizza and never will (unless I win one here). I like your skillet-broiler method for Neopolitan-esque pizzas, and love the simplicity of your pan pizza dough, but I don't take pictures of the crust or analyze the char. Sometimes I knead your "no-knead" doughs so I don't have to wait as long. Sometimes I don't let my neopolitan dough rest in the fridge. Sometimes I use dough I bought at Trader Joes. Sometimes, I just use the basic bread dough recipe form "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day" because it's possible to bake with it 2 hours after you start. Sometimes I mix herbs, even crappy dried herbs and garlic powder, into the dough. And you know what? It's always delicious.

That's what I liked about the article; the idea that it's actually really easy to make interesting things that you'll like more than whatever your crappy local option is. And crappy local options for pizza exist in every city.

Chicken nachos from Noche Mexicana on the UWS. They have carrots and pickled jalapeños and are generally amazing. Favorite takeout meal ever and I miss them immensely here in Nashville.

Probably Shake Shack. The farm burger at The Pharmacy here in Nashville is pretty close.

The only restaurant I ever traveled to the UES to eat at was Candle 79, for a blowout vegan Thanksgiving that certainly proved to ME that you don't need meat for a giant delicious mind-blowing meal. I don't know what the place is like the rest of the year, but it's definitely worth trying.

Otherwise, I don't know. I worked on the UES (78th and Madison) for a long time, and never found a casual restaurant better than medicore (other than Shake Shake.) I barely even found INTERESTING options, and the few I did find weren't memorable and were overpriced.

I think collard greens would work pretty well in a wilted salad. I made one recently with beet greens, which I find to behave quite similarly to collards, and it was wonderful.

I doubt they'd stay quite as crisp as kale, but they'd stay much crisper than a traditional lettuce. Frankly, collards aren't as crisp as kale is when they're raw, so you're starting from a losing position.

Anyway, it certainly can't hurt to try it.

My local Kroger is completely and utterly mediocre, but I do the vast majority of my shopping there and get by. I will occasionally go to Whole Foods or a tiny neighborhood organic store for something a little higher quality (and frequent the farmer's market obsessively in the spring-autumn), but for weekly staples Kroger mostly gets me by. The exceptions are eggs, milk, and meat - I get them all from local sources, and big chains like Kroger don't carry them (the local Whole Foods does, as does my local butcher and some smaller stores).

I'm in a town with plenty of Publix's (though none within 10 miles of me), but the few times I've visited I've found them pricey. Yes, they have a nicer bakery, etc, but I make my own bread anyway.

@mellyrn

Possibly late, but I don't think you can make ricotta from the yogurt whey. The protein, necessary to make the cheese, is all in the yogurt. This is why strained yogurt has a much higher protein content by weight than regular yogurt - straining the whey leaves the protein behind.

From what I've gathered, yogurt whey, rennet whey, and acid whey are all different wheys. Only the rennet whey can be made into ricotta because it still has a pretty high protein content.

If your yogurt whey has enough protein to make ricotta, you should be able to do it by heating the whey and mixing in acid, just like Kenji does in this recipe. You'll get a (very few) curds you can strain again to make ricotta. But it will taste yogurty, you definitely won't get much, and you'll still have whey!

I bake with the yogurt whey (it's a great buttermilk substitute for even lighter pancakes and biscuites) and eat it on oatmeal. It also makes a very refreshing cocktail mixed with a little sugar and some gin, believe it or not. But I have also reduced my whey amounts by mixing powdered milk in with my milk before making yogurt - I use a blender and don't get any textural issues, and the yogurt is significantly thicker straight out of inoculation, so I don't have to strain nearly as much to get real greek yogurt texture.

But what do you use to replace the blue cheese?

Im not vegan, but Trader Joes meatless meatballs are actually great if you never ever think of them as meat and pretend they were just sold as crumbled soy protein. They fall apart nicely in pasta sauce and add great texture and protein - honestly a simple tomato sauce with several of these crumbled in it is a great simple spaghetti sauce and superior to every "quick ragu" I have ever made with beef. Not better than a real multi hour ragu, of course, but it takes 20 minutes or less.

Spicy! My wife thought these tasted overwhelmingly of chipotle. I agreed though I enjoy that taste so wasn't as offended. We both loved the texture so next time I will reduce the chipotle by half or more, and possibly reduce the lime in the slaw a bit.

Sliced very thin on a neopolitan pizza.

When will we get the Food Lab cookbook to add to this list?

I got the Cooks Illustrated book as an early present from a friend, and it really is a cut above their other works in terms of food science - much better than I was expecting and very well laid out. The vast majority of the recipes are already in other books, bu the science isn't collected anywhere else.