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I'm with you - I'd choose Melissa Clark!

Definitely cook the spinach, squeeze it dry, and freeze it -- it'll cook way way down, like @Lili13 said, and then you can deal with it at your leisure. Wrap the other greens (separating each type) loosely in plastic with a layer of paper towel between the greens and the plastic to trap moisture, refrigerate them, and they'll probably keep for up to a week.

Steakhouse-style wedge salads with blue cheese dressing and bacon are my favorite use of iceberg, and I love romaine for Nigella Lawson's fattoush recipe -- salad with avocado, jalapenos, lime juice and toasted pita instead of croutons.

Plums could make a wonderful cobbler, or look up Dimply Plum Cake on smittenkitchen.com. Or if you have a grill, they'd be great halved, grilled, drizzled with honey and topped with either ice cream or sweetened ricotta.

I love it on toasted walnut bread with a drizzle of honey -- truffle honey if you've got it. Also makes great crostini mashed up with chopped pistachios and basil. If you end up buying more and are up for more involved recipes, it can be made into ice cream or sweetened for stuffing cannoli. Ooh, now I want some!

Sriracha, or the closely related sambal oelek.

OMG I love crab rangoon with a passion. I had it once in Chinatown with an actual all-crab filling and no cream cheese and was SO disappointed. Inauthenticity for the win!

Fell in love with drinking vinegars at Pok Pok on a visit to Portland and have been exploring them since our return to NYC. Most of what's sold seems to be concentrate, best mixed with seltzer or something else bubbly, and there's some sugar in it too. So drinking "drinking vinegar" is not all that much like drinking regular vinegar.

Definitely expect them to be the hot new thing on NYC cocktail menus within the year.

I've had good luck with all the tips above (they have to be very dry, and not moved) but have also recently started using half-butter half-oil, and the solids in the butter help things brown up a little darker. With a hot pan this only takes about 2 minutes per side (2 for top and 2 for bottom).

Also, don't crowd the pan. That leads to steaming, not searing.

I've taken half a dozen of the cooking classes at Astor Center and they have all been wonderful -- hands-on cooking for 3 hours in a group of about 12, and at the end you sit down to eat all your cooking and have it paired with wine by the somm. Intermediate-level classes include a lobster primer, pasta- or pizza-making, and all sorts of ethnic cuisines from Indian to Moroccan to Portuguese. Just make sure you snack beforehand because at a 6pm class you won't actually be eating until 9-ish.

That said, I've heard Blue Hill at Stone Barns is amazing, and definitely worth doing for a special occasion.

Oh man, SO good, these cookies. Paid my annual visit and wrote it up with a few details and pix for the Simmer blog. The Jammers are a really nice addition.

Meatballs. Garlic bread. Caramelized shallots. All can be eaten by themselves or with the pasta in various combos.

Dessert: sorbet served with champagne (or cava or prosecco) so they can either have a little sorbet in their champagne (like a bellini) or a little champagne in their sorbet (like a dessert slush.) Or the classic affogato: vanilla gelato "drowned" in espresso.

Mmmmm, salute to carbs.

My favorite butterless Paula Deen recipe -- scallops in bacon paste. Mmmmm, bacon paste.

If you can already get those raw ingredients elsewhere, maybe you go for something prepared? From what I remember (it's been a few years) their chowders are supposed to be pretty good, and if they arrive frozen you could just keep them on hand for a future winter evening warmup....

Really good for braising with chicken, or beef, or pork, or whatever you've got -- and if you're cooking it for a long time in liquid, you don't even have to strip the leaves from the stems. Just throw it in, and a couple hours later when everything's all nice and braise-y, pull out the stems and discard -- the leaves will have fallen off.