Friday Links to Love, With New York City Food Gifts!

Photo: From when I made chocolate treats with Jacques Torres!

I recently gave my aunt a thank-you-for-letting-us-crash-at-your-house bag full of NYC foodie gifts, things that are from New York or the Hamptons.  I added a Dean & Deluca mug and NYC postcards.  I really want her to come visit and am hoping they entice her to come sooner rather than later! 

For future gifts, I made a list of NYC items that are easy to ship or pack for out-of-town relatives and friends:

• Tate's Bake Shop cookies from Southampton, NY: Addicting! And if you find yourself in the Hamptons, you can visit the bake shop that started it all. They have nice holiday cookie packs too.
• Jars of Hamptons Honey: Delicious honey for your tea from Southampton, NY
• Fat Witch Bakery Brownie Mix: At Chelsea Market and on some grocery store shelves
• Sarabeth's Jams: One of the city's great brunch spots
• Jacques Torres Chocolate: I had a wonderful time making chocolate with Jacques Torres himself a couple of months ago. The DUMBO outpost is great. 
• Jars of Rao's pasta sauce: The vodka sauce is the best jarred sauce you'll ever taste. So if you can't get into Rao's (someday I will), you can buy the sauce. 

So it will come as no surprise that one of the links I loved this week was a slideshow from SeriousEats with gifts for NYC food lovers! Their list had more perishable items (cheese, bialys, pastrami) on it but it's a nice round-up.  SeriousEats slideshow

More fun links: 

• From The Huffington Post comes a cool video of Washington, D.C. at night (time-lapsed shots)
• This week, NASA announced the discovery of the first EARTH-LIKE PLANET outside of our solar system and that all the components are right for life: "Such planets have the right distance from their star to support water, plus a suitable temperature and atmosphere to support life." Too bad it would take us 600 years to get there IF we could travel at the speed of light.
• A great piece from The Atlantic on how growing food organically, without cancer-causing chemicals, can actually double or triple crop yields and feed more people in a better way: Organic Can Feed the World
• This hotel freak loved drooling over Conde Nast Traveler's picks for Most Gorgeous Hotel Bathrooms (I love the Presidential Suite at the Mandarin Oriental in New York)