In the blogosphere, I find there are two main types of websites: (1) that we like to peruse and (2) that we actually use. This seems especially true with cooking – as everyone-and-their-mother vies to be bookmarked in the limited attention span of the public's food-porn reel.

I’m a total peruser. I can spend hours on TasteSpotting, tagging photos linked to recipes - sometimes in languages I don’t even understand - that I would never in my wildest dreams actually want to cook. Part of this stems from the fact that, in reality, I don’t even like recipes. I tend to use them as inspiration, rather than actual instructions. But every once-in-a-while, I fall upon a website that straddles the two worlds - fun to peruse and practical to use.

I discovered Honest Fare the week that Hurricane Irene was heading toward NYC. My photographer sister and I decided that if we had to hunker down for a few days, we might as well dine like kings. After a cyclone of a shopping trip through Eataly (there were literally women buying shopping carts full of high-end water bottles), we cooked our first apocalypse-worthy supper : my grandmother's anchovy/walnut pasta & a warm endive and fennel salad from Honest Fare.

On Saturday, friends living in the flood zone came to join our Midtown camp-out. Again, we turned to Honest Fare, this time to an easy-to-assemble vegetarian tartine.

From there, we drank wine, sang songs, watched reruns and tried to remain sane. Irene never (really) came, but we had still feasted like gourmet peasants - upon the fresh, simple (and well, honest) food of Honest Fare.