I was at a certain upscale natural foods store today buying eggs. They offered a bewildering variety: organic, cage-free, omega-3 fortified, grade A or AA, chickens fed entirely on prime rib, etc. Whenever I’m faced with an egg dilemma like this, I settle it the same way: I look on the end of the carton for the pack date.

The pack date is a number between 1 and 366 corresponding to the day of the year. On this day, which is no more than a day or two after the lay date, the eggs were washed, graded, and packed. The eggs I ended up with (organic hand-gathered grade AA large, although I’m sure “hand-gathered” is a euphemism) said “50” on them. That means they were packed on February 19–four days ago. Not bad. Some of the eggs at the market were six weeks old. Eggs are supposed to be pulled a month after the pack date, but obviously this doesn’t always happen.

Does egg freshness matter? I did a taste test with chef Sara Moot at Persimmon in Seattle, and we found that the fresh eggs from a local farm were great (duh), but regular supermarket eggs were pretty much just as good when they were purchased shortly after pack date. The fresher supermarket eggs were way better than an old carton of organic eggs.

So, that’s what I know about eggs. If anyone knows what “hand-gathered” really means, let’s hear it.

On Culinate:

Towel dry: Stop killing trees and get with the microfiber

On Serious Eats:

The Nut-Free Sandwich Solution

Enjoy!

We spent the weekend in Vancouver and, as always, found something new and fabulous to eat, aside from Timbits.

This time it was Liberté Méditeranée brand yogurt. It’s sold at Urban Fare and other supermarkets, but there’s a dairy stand at Granville Island with an especially strong selection. The flavors include coconut, mocha, and mango-orange; we tried hazelnut. It has a hazelnut paste on the bottom to stir in, just slightly crunchy. It’s not as thick as Greek yogurt, but it has plenty of milkfat.

It’s made in Quebec and available all over Canada. Apparently you can find it in the Northeastern US, too.

I really never thought I’d get excited about yogurt, but now I eat it all the time. It’s the active probiotic cultures, or possibly the heavy cream.

Just as I threatened, I took Iris to [Cafe Campagne](http://www.campagnerestaurant.com/cafe_home.html) for steak frites. The steak was hanger, cooked beautifully rare, served with roquefort butter. “Keep that steak coming,” said Iris as I cut bites for her. She enjoyed the chewy, blood-rare steak, but she had no interest in the best thing on the plate: leaves of lemony, garlicky sauteed chard and escarole. Fine. More for me.

After lunch, I couldn’t get those greens out of my mind. They were lightly cooked, still a little crunchy, with plenty of lemon juice and butter. It was a perfect winter side dish. So I went through several bunches of greens trying to reproduce it. Every time, I ended up with good flavor but limp greens.

I realized that I was mentally slotting escarole and chard into the same category as kale and collards, which meant my impulse was to blanch them before sauteing. This turned out to be unnecessary and positively detrimental. Greens don’t come in two categories, tender and tough: they’re a tasty continuum from the lightest wisp of baby lettuce to the most leathery turnip green. Chard and escarole, along with other greens like radicchio and lacinato kale, fall right about in the middle. You can braise them gently. If you’re careful to slice and dress them properly, you can use them in a salad, as Melissa Clark memorably did last year with lacinato kale. (I was all excited to try this salad until a trusted friend told me she tried it and it was, well, not so good.)

And you can saute them. I tore leaves of chard and escarole into small pieces by hand. I heated a tablespoon each of olive oil and butter in a large saute pan and added the greens, minced garlic, and salt and pepper. When the greens began to wilt, I covered the pan and let them cook for about a minute. Then I finished them off with a big squeeze of lemon juice. The greens cooked down a lot and I wished I’d started with more, but they were restaurant-quality.

Just ask Iris, who still didn’t want any.

Yesterday I was at Whole Foods, and the guy in front of me was commenting loudly on the price of the Pralus chocolate gift set, ten 1-ounce bars for $40. “Is there hash in those?” he asked the cashier.

“I wish,” the cashier replied.

I was glad for this bit of mirth, because it drew my attention to a different expensive chocolate product, Valrhona Perles Croquantes. They’re tiny cracker bits coated in 55 percent dark chocolate, so you end up with crunchy chocolate spheres a couple millimeters in diameter. They are superb on ice cream (especially coffee), and because the cracker is fully insulated by chocolate, they’ll presumably hold their crunch well in homemade ice cream, cookies, or maybe some demented iced bubble tea-like concoction.

If you can’t find them at a Whole Foods or chocolate shop near you, you can order them from Chocosphere, albeit for $30 per kilogram.