Adam D. Roberts's Blog, page 141

White Lasagna

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When I get invited to dinner parties, these days, I pretty much make it a policy not to take pictures. This takes the pressure off the host or hostess, who may be nervous that their food blogging friend is scrutinizing every bite, preparing to skewer them for all the world to see on his food blog the next morning. Mostly, though it takes the pressure off me: by not taking pictures, there's no expectation that I'm going to blog about it. So if you're wondering why the sweet potato souffle...

Win Coco by Phaidon

One of the most beautiful books to come into my possession in recent months has been the Coco book by Phaidon (see here). The book features ten master chefs (including Mario Batali, Ferran Adria, and Fergus Henderson) who write essays about their ten favorite chefs (100 chefs total); there are gorgeous pictures, recipes and a singular design (our art savvy friend who works at the Guggenheim couldn't stop raving when she saw this book). And now the book can be yours! To win it, cook a dish...

Frosty Banana Berry Smoothie

College is for experimenting, right? We know all about your gay make-out session and that time you tried to smoke catnip. When I was in college, I'd experiment with smoothies. I'd go to Smoothie King, right there in Emory Village (because I went to Emory, see) and order a Caribbean Way which was 5 squirts of this and 4 squirts of that and, if I wanted, a shot of protein powder. Then came Jamba Juice with a few more squirts of this and that and some other strange powders and I was hooked...

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.