Catesby Holmes, one of our colleagues at sister mag Travel + Leisure, weighs in on this unlikely collaboration:

“Naked Chef” Jamie Oliver has teamed up with Match.com in the UK, the original online yenta, to establish a forum for food lovers to meet, mingle and turn up the heat (and not just on their stainless steel ranges). Jamieoliver.com/dating has related articles like "Making the First Meal for Your Partner" and "Food to Make You Fall in Love." Hey, even if you don’t find The One, at least you’ll get a good meal out of it.

Our stupendous food intern, Molly Adams, recently cooked up some very special burgers for us lucky editors. Here, she reports:

The premium burger just got a little more attainable. Pat LaFrieda—the butcher who supplies custom meat blends to Shake Shack, Little Owl and other restaurants known for their burgers—is now selling three types of patties to home cooks: beef brisket, beef short rib and original beef. (Unfortunately, they’re only available to NYC cooks, since the burgers are sold by the grocery-delivery service Fresh Direct.) The secret to these ultra-juicy patties is in the grind—or should I say chop? LaFrieda only chops small batches of whole-muscle Black Angus beef from Creekstone Farms and ensures the meat is not crushed or overworked, which can make burgers tough and dry. Last week, with the help of Kitchen Assistant Brian Malik, we cooked up a dozen LaFrieda burgers. The unanimous favorite: the brisket burger, which was incredibly moist and flavorful ($6 a pound; freshdirect.com).

 

Buenos Aires's San Telmo market bustles on Sundays with shoppers scouting vintage finds. After wandering the stalls, my friends and I were led by our noses to the corner of México and Defensa, where locals were queuing up for lunch at grills set up in the gated parking lot. We ordered some massive choripanes (sausage sandwiches) and vacipanes (steak sandwiches). I was a little nervous about the sausage—it had clearly been hanging from a tree branch, unrefrigerated, all day—but in the end, its subtle spiciness helped it win out over the chimichurri-covered steak. If only I could get a similar lunch in midtown New York for $2.50!

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

Since we were planning to stay in DC for the night, Jose Andres encouraged us to have dinner at one of his restaurants. Although minibar at Café Atlantico is the talk of the town in Washington right now, I was in the mood for paella so we opted for Jose's bar and tapas joint, Jaleo.

Jaleo has been open for years and yet it's always festive and buzzing. Two highlights of our meal were a delicious arroz negro paella and lomo iberico, a salt-roasted pork tenderloin. Jose joined us for the second half of the meal, and it was great to have a chance to catch up with a good friend I don't see often enough.

 

Like every teenage girl in America today, I'm super-excited about seeing the new movie New Moon, based on the second book in the Twilight saga by Stephenie Meyer. When Bella Swan (the heroine of the saga) is not being hunted by bloodthirsty vampires or obsessing about her hottie vampire boyfriend Edward Cullen, she's often in the kitchen making home-cooked meals, like Super-Crispy Fried Chicken (pictured).

Find more Recipes for New Moon Fans here.

Even for me, it was too early to start drinking cocktails at lunch yesterday at David Chang's Má Pêche, temporarily located in the lounge of the Chambers Hotel in midtown Manhattan (sometime this winter, it will move to a permanent home in the former Town space). I couldn't have had one, anyway: Don Lee doesn't start serving his ridiculously good cocktails until 5 p.m., when the hostess stand turns into a bar. On the just-now-official drinks menu, Lee has installed classics like Dark & Stormys, Manhattans and Negronis, as well as ingenious items like the Sesame Old-Fashioned, made with toasted-sesame-infused Cognac, and my new favorite, the sake-based 7 Spice Sour, flavored with togarashi, the Japanese seven-spice powder (lucky me, I got to preview it when Lee was testing it out at Ssäm Bar).

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

The main event on day five was a trip to DC Central Kitchen, a non-profit organization whose mission is to combat hunger and poverty. I've heard a lot about it over the years from my friend Jose Andres, who currently sits on DCCK's board of directors, and I thought that this was the perfect opportunity for a visit.

As someone who has spent the lion's share of the past thirty years cooking food for fortunate people, hunger issues have always held a special importance to me. Lately they have taken on a new prominence in my life, since my wife and I set out to make a film called "Hungry In America," about this nation's hunger crisis.

DC Central Kitchen is part of the solution, producing and distributing 4,500 healthy meals per day to shelters and other social services programs. They recover over a ton of food daily from restaurants, schools, hotels, and farmers markets, but what they can't get donated they buy from area farmers. At this point, 75% of their raw ingredients are locally grown — something most people can't say about their own home cooked meals.

But that's just the beginning. DC Central Kitchen also generates almost half of its $5.2 million annual budget for its programs from a for-profit catering division, Fresh Start Catering. And the organization goes one step further with a 12-week culinary job training program, addressing the roots of hunger by helping unemployed, homeless, and previously incarcerated adults get back in the workforce. Many of the organization's own 73 employees are graduates of the program.

We took a tour of DCCK's 10,000 square foot kitchen with Jose Andres, founder Michael Curtin, and Chief Development Officer Brian McNair. Salaried employees were busy prepping meals alongside a handful of young kids who had come in from local schools as part of an after school program. They were slicing tomatoes and squash, learning a valuable new skill while doing something for the community.

DCCK is a unique and fascinating model for addressing hunger issues, and one that I hope spreads to New York soon.

 I eat meat pretty sparingly, so my trip to Buenos Aires helped me fill my beef quota well into 2010. I was craving vegetables only two days into the trip, but luckily, I found an inventive way to get them: cocktails. The Home Hotel, funded by U2 producer Flood and Crowded House bassist Nick Seymour back in 2005, has vintage wallpaper, an enchanting back garden and a fantastic bar. The Scarlett the Tart, made with beet juice, was a deep fuchsia, but my favorite drink was Albert's Rocket, made with tequila, egg whites, simple syrup, lime, olive oil and arugula. With the greens strained out, only a hint of the arugula's pepperiness remained, giving the frothy drink a great kick.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

On our way up from the Chesapeake Bay to Washington DC, we were relieved to see rain give way to clear skies. A few days earlier we had cold-called Ray LaSala, the president of the Mycological Association of Washington DC (or MAW, to those on the know), asking if he would take us out foraging for mushrooms when we were in the area. We were now on our way to meet Ray at a regional park south of DC and spend a couple of hours scanning the forest floor for fungi.

I love mushrooms. Since day one my menus at Craft and Craftsteak have included not just one but several different seasonal varieties of roasted mushroom as side dishes, from Hen of the Woods to Chanterelles to Trompette Royals and Bluefoots, to name just a few.

When we met Ray and his three fellow MAW members, all were concerned that we might not have much luck foraging at this time of year. As it turned out, they were right; the only edible fungi that we were able to find that day were a few honey mushrooms. Regardless, we were all glad to stretch our legs and work off at least a little bit of the previous night's dinner. Another bonus was the chance discovery of my first wild paw paw tree, which bears a fruit that tastes a lot like a banana and but grows right in the Mid-Atlantic.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

When it came time to hit the sheets, Travis and Ryan recommended a local institution just a few minutes down the road, the Hope & Glory Inn. Peggy and Dudley Patteson have taken a 19th Century schoolhouse and converted it into a country inn, complete with private one-bedroom cottages (originally dormitories) out back. We didn't get to spend much time at the Hope & Glory, but it Peggy and Dudley's southern hospitality was a welcome change from the impersonal, big brand hotels that I so often end up in when travelling.