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Dude.

Cheesecake. :-)

The hawker center near my house in Singapore. :-) Char siew is my favorite kind of barbecued meat.

The notion of a New York brunch is a little foreign to me, but heavens, if a bagel piled high with cream cheese and lox isn't the perfect way to brunch, anyway, I don't know what is.

Filet mignon!

Oh, the no-knead bread recipe -- not just because it works, and is wonderful, but because it led to all sorts of other breads -- and helped me realize I like kneading, anyway. ;-)

I love dal with coconut milk. We make lots of different versions of dal (I can't get enough of lentils), but the coconut milk one, which I reverse-engineered from a meal at a Sri-Lankan restaurant, is the most decadent and the most delicious.

We don't use ghee when we make dal with coconut, because it really doesn't need it. Sometimes we heat a bit of the coconut cream until it becomes oil, and use that to fry the onions in. The crucial thing with dal, as with all Indian dishes, is frying the heck out of the onions. Wait until they're well and truly brown, and some of them are black -- it's worth it. Also, toasting and grinding whole cumin makes a huge difference.

Mmm.

Spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, or potato salad.

Oof.

I think I'd have a chocolate-espresso tart dusted with cocoa and a large curl of chocolate.

And I think it might have to be the size of my head.

I love my local independent grocery store, Hyde Park Produce (I live in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South Chicago) so much that if they weren't right next to my apartment, I would probably move.

Barbecued husband!

Just kidding. My husband did make himself the center of a rather startling conflagration several Fourth's ago, though, when he opened the lid of a barbecue grill and was confronted by a flaming ball that singed his eyelashes and earned him the nickname "burnt toast."

Ahem. I like to make barbecued shrimp, prepared with a very simple olive oil, red chilli, and lemon juice marinade.

Actually, forget I asked that -- I just realized, of course, it's a bread. It's not going to do well in the fridge. :-)

Dori, I have a loaf of this sitting in the kitchen as I type and it is a cheese-lover's dream. Next time I might use a better quality cheddar, but as it is it's pretty darned wonderful.

How long do you think it would last in the fridge?