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What is dirt candy? Vegetables, of course. When you eat a vegetable you’re eating little more than dirt that’s been transformed by plenty of sunshine and rain into something that’s full of flavor: Dirt Candy. It’s also the name of my restaurant, which opened in October, 2008.

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Since opening, we’ve been named the “Best Vegetarian Restaurant in NYC” by both amNew York and L Magazine, Citysearch readers have voted us the “Best Vegan Restaurant in NYC” and the Village Voice singled us out for having the “Best Grits in NYC.” I was named one of the twelve Rising Star Chefs in New York by Starchefs, and the 2010 Michelin Guide included Dirt Candy as one of their Bib Gourmand choices, one of only 85 restaurants in the entire city to receive that honor. Oh, and the late, great Gourmet gave us an award for having the “Funniest Restaurant Blog.”

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Over the last 10 years, I’ve worked in a lot of vegetarian restaurants in New York City, but Dirt Candy is a vegetarian restaurant done my way. Most vegetarian restaurants are lifestyle-driven, not chef-driven, and their aim is to present healthy food that conforms to vegetarian principles, often by serving basic meat recipes with soy products replacing the meat portion of the dish.

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At Dirt Candy, we don’t care about your health. And we don’t care about your politics either. Just as Le Bernardin is dedicated to seafood, and Peter Luger’s is dedicated to steak, Dirt Candy is dedicated to one thing: cooking vegetables. For us, flavor comes first and lifestyle, health and political choices come second.

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The menu is always changing and there’s always something going on over here so either sign up for our mailing list (here) or keep checking this blog for updates about menu changes and our latest news. And we’re on Facebook just like the cool kids, so you can keep up with us there as well.

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Saturday’s family meal:

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Raspberry smoothies, sticky rice, spicy potatoes with egg whites. Why do we have sticky rice? Where did it even come from? No one seems to know. Up at 7:30am to get ready for teaching the four hour (!) class today. Why am I up this early? No one seems to know.

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I missed one of these from earlier this week, so here’s a family meal catch-up:

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Blueberry smoothies, fried eggs, sundried tomato rice  and a hash brown cake. You may have noticed that eggs are something of a theme.

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Today’s family meal…

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Black bean soup and fried egg whites. It’s all about simplicity on Friday.

(And about having left over egg whites.)

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Ah, public radio. Where would we be without your dulcet tones? I went down to Philadelphia to do an interview for “A Chef’s Table” last year on WHYY and the episode will finally be airing this weekend as part of their Valentine’s Day episode. You can listen on the radio or pick it up when they podcast. Full info is over here at their website.

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And if you head over to their site now, you can listen to their show about cardoons. Who doesn’t want to know more about cardoons?

Today we’re kicking it old school vegetarian style. Circa 1983!

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Broccoli and broccolini stems with mushy brown rice with black beans and carrot sundried tomato salad.

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Meet our new red wine: Le Fraghe Bardolino 2008. It’s from the Le Fraghe winery in Cavaion Veronese, near Verona, in northeastern Italy. Verona was a vacation spot for Julius Caesar and the setting for Romeo & Juliet and the Le Fraghe Bardolino is definitely a story about two star-crossed grapes. On the one hand, you have corvina, a highly structured grape with lots of body and a distinctive sour cherry taste. On the other, you have rondinella grapes which are simple and uncomplicated, don’t have a lot of flavor but are low in sugar.

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Here’s Tuesday’s family meal.

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Tofu, egg and watermelon radish salad with leftover tomato chickpea soup.

This is how much I love you. Tonight is the season premiere of the last season of Lost and I’m keeping the restaurant open, which means that I won’t be able to watch Lost until this weekend when I have time off.

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Lost is the only thing I get excited about anymore. The one TV show that I look forward to, the bright spot in my life which is all too often an unending string of chores, emergencies and disasters. I wanted to be closed tonight, but I have an obligation to my customers, and to my staff, and mew mew mew. So when you look up and see me plating your gnocchi in the kitchen you’re not looking at the chef and owner of Dirt Candy, you’re looking at the girl who gave up Lost for you.

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So be kind. Do not talk about Lost, refer to Lost, mention characters from Lost or speculate about future plotlines on Lost when you eat at Dirt Candy this week. I need a special kind of understanding this week until I can get my fix on Sunday.

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Sorry it took me so long to get this up here, but I was swamped. However, the honey dinner on February 18th sold out within hours of being announced, and we have a 40 person waiting list. If you want to be on the list, let me know (you could still get in, stranger things have happened). And thanks to all of you for being so interested in this. I was kind of worried about it!

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Jesus is completely horrified by this project and is trying to make the family meals look better.

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Today’s family meal: grits and broccoli, eggs and a sundried tomato salad.