Adam D. Roberts's Blog, page 140

The Best Falafel in New York?

A reader named Sara writes in with the following question: "Hi Adam! My fiance and I are coming to the city for a short trip next weekend. Our ultimate goal is to see a favorite band of ours, but other than that our visit will be focused on food. Our home (Asheville, NC) has pretty amazing food for a little southern town, but we are sorely lacking a good falafel. I've been reading your blog for several years now (and I'm a huge fan), and I'm curious to know where you think the best falafel ...

What To Do With Meyer Lemons

I'm trying not to be dramatic here, but I can't avoid the second half of this sentence: if you haven't had a Meyer lemon, you haven't lived!

Yes, that was a pretty dramatic thing to say, but let's look at the facts: (1) A regular lemon isn't very subtle, it's an acidic attack on your taste buds. A Meyer lemon? It's a subtly perfumed orangey lemony hybrid---it makes a regular lemon look like a punk; (2) regular lemons are around all year long, they pile up in their sad bins at the grocery s...

Asparagus, Amanda Hesser & Food52

Dip into the archives of my blog, go way back, and you'll see that at the very beginning one of my very first gastronomical spirit guides was Amanda Hesser. I read her book, "Cooking For Mr. Latte," while studying for the bar exam (here's my 2004 post about it) and then proceeded to cook my way through the book. I've made her vanilla bean loaves, carrot fennel soup, chicken roasted with sour cream and mango chutney, salt and pepper shrimp, and, of course, the almond cake that is my go-to...

St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake

Sometimes a recipe is so intriguing, so mysteriously alluring, so strange that there's nothing you can do but make it to see what it tastes like. That's precisely what happened when I saw this St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake on what's becoming my #1 favorite internet recipe resource, Smitten Kitchen. I'm friends with Deb--we ate noodles together a few weeks ago--so I hope she doesn't mind the fact that I'm cooking her entire ouvere here on my blog. I feel ok about it, though, because she...

Kim Severson's "Spoon Fed"

The blender arrived in the middle of our conversation.

Kim Severson, of The New York Times, was interviewing me for a story about crowdsourcing recipes (I didn't have much to contribute but I was excited to chat with Kim for the first time) and in the middle of our lively chat, my doorbell rang.

"Oh," I said, "I think that's the blender that Vitamix is sending me."

"Vitamix is sending you a blender?" she asked, incredulous. I signed for the package and carried it up the...

A Weekend in The Catskills (Kate's Lazy Meadow, Peekamoose, Sweet Sue's & Cucina)

There was a lot to celebrate this past weekend--Craig got hired to direct an episode of MTV's "Made," I (insert secret exciting thing here), plus it was our four year anniversary--so we decided to go away before our lives got incredibly busy. I researched online various options for us, places easy to get to from Manhattan (some contenders: the North Fork of Long Island, the Hudson Valley, Asbury Park) but when I typed in "Catskills New York Times" and this page loaded up, I had to call...

The First Newsletter

My very first newsletter went out this morning (subscribe here) and, as promised, it contains very exclusive content, including a secret salad I made the other night for dinner, my favorite dish at Colicchio & Sons and a picture of the crowds at the Village Voice Choice Eats event. If you're still not convinced that you want to subscribe, here--for one time only--is a link to the newsletter on the web. But don't get used to it! Sign up now.

The Best Chili of Your Life

If Craig had his way, this post wouldn't have this title. I just asked him, "Would you call the chili I made the other day the best of your life?" And he answered: "I don't even think of it as chili because there weren't any beans; just lots of meat and stuff. But it was certainly delicious."

Luckily, when my friend Diana ate it, she said the words that justify this post's title. "This is seriously the best chili I've ever had."

It's also the best chili I've ever had. And...

On Breadcrumbs & Croutons

Molly Wizenberg, who many of you know as Orangette, has cooked for me three times over the course of our friendship. All three meals have been documented here on the blog: the first meal was in January of 2007, the next was a New Year's Eve dinner (actually I can't find the post about that) and then, finally, the meal that Molly's husband Brandon made for me when I was stranded in Seattle during a blizzard. So actually she didn't cook that third meal.

But the point is that I was...

The New & Improved Amateur Gourmet

It's 7:45 AM and I can't contain it anymore. I laid in bed last night, jittery and nervous, anxious and excited. In just a few hours the new version of my blog, the blog I'd been writing for the past six years, would be launching. And now--standing before you in all its glory--is the new & improved Amateur Gourmet.

Take a moment to soak it in. Why does everything feel so clear and open? What's that revolutionary new feature on the right? The Amateur Gourmet Community Blog? Don't ask...