Adam D. Roberts's Blog, page 83

It’s The SECRETS OF THE BEST CHEFS Nationwide Book Tour (Celebrity Chefs! Lavish Dinners! Me!)

[All of the pictures in this post by the brilliant Elizabeth Leitzell]

It’s rare that life offers you a reason to pinch yourself. That reason came on Friday when my cookbook publicists Allison and Molly presented me with the full breakdown of my SECRETS OF THE BEST CHEFS book tour. There’s a dinner at Eataly hosted by Lidia Bastianich (which is almost totally sold out already, that’s why you should follow me on Twitter!), a conversation about recipes (what are they? who owns them?) with Amanda Hesser and Jonathan Waxman at the Greenlight book store in Brooklyn, a dinner at Nancy Silverton’s Mozza in L.A., an afterhours dinner at Tartine in San Francisco prepared by the extraordinary chef Samin Nosrat, a dinner at Hugh Acheson’s Empire State South in Atlanta and a dinner at Renee Erickson’s widely praised Walrus and the Carpenter in Seattle. Do you see why I’m pinching myself? What follows is the full tour breakdown with dates and links and phone numbers so you can make your reservations. To be honest, I’m most excited to meet all of you nice people out there who read what I write every day… so please come out and say hi!

Click here to read the rest of this Amateur Gourmet post »

Pizzeria Mozza’s Coconut Sorbet Pie

Despite the fact that I’ve been in New York for a week now, and that I’ve eaten many wonderful meals so far, the dish I can’t get out of my head is a dish I had in L.A. just before I left. True, I already mentioned it in my newsletter (subscribe here!) and true I’ve written enough about Pizzeria Mozza on this site already it may as well become a Mozza fan page. (It was, after all, my pick for #1 restaurant in L.A.) But this dessert! Let me tell you about this dessert…

Click here to read the rest of this Amateur Gourmet post »

Rosh Hashanah Dinner at Kutsher’s Tribeca

As life was ending in the Catskills, my life was just beginning. I was only a kid when my parents drove my brother and I upstate to experience the splendor (or former splendor) of the great bastions of Jewish entertainment. We stayed in hotels like The Concord and Kutsher’s where the carpeting was well-worn and the smell was a pungent mixture of mothballs and boiled eggs. I remember a lunch in a sunny dining room with faded pink tablecloths and a plate of refrigerated gefilte fish plopped down in front of us, my dad teaching me how to cover it extravagantly with spicy horseradish to mask its nothingness. We saw Frankie Valli perform. We saw The Turtles. An artist named Morris Katz painted landscapes in the lobby. These memories circled around a vague mist in my head as I joined my parents for dinner this past Monday night to celebrate Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) at Manhattan’s resurrection of this time and place: Kutsher’s Tribeca.

Click here to read the rest of this Amateur Gourmet post »

Down With Communal Tables!

[Image via I'm Only Here For The Food]

At long last, after weeks of waiting, we’re going to that great restaurant everyone’s been talking up. We’ve pinched pennies, we’ve cleared calendars, we’ve read the reviews online and the menu and strategized endlessly about how and what we’ll order. Only: this place doesn’t take reservations, so we’re showing up early and hoping for the best. Here comes the hostess now, she says she can seat us right away. We follow her past tiny tables, where pitying eyes peer at us over elongated menus, to an extended piece of wood surrounded by chairs and covered with half-finished plates and half-sipped glasses of wine that all reverberate with the noise of countless voices chattering at high speed. This, we soon learn, is the dreaded communal table and before we can express our willingness to wait for a two-top or a four-top or any top that’s not a communal-top, the hostess drops the menus and flees.

Click here to read the rest of this Amateur Gourmet post »

Where Do You Escape For Pre-Dinner Oysters?

I’m a late bloomer when it comes to oysters. It’s not that I’d been squeamish (though I had seen the Punky Brewster episode where an oyster falls down her blouse when she’s adopted by rich parents) or concerned about eating something recently alive. It’s more that it felt risky; like: “Who knows where that oyster came from? It could be from someone’s bathtub!” Getting over my issues didn’t take much; it just took a platter of oysters with friends consumed by the beach. No other food better captures a sense of environment than oysters. Eating them, no matter where you are, you’re instantly transported to the water, to a glass of chilled white wine, even if you’re not drinking a glass of chilled white wine. Here are my five favorite oyster experiences so far, perfect for a pre-dinner date.

Click here to read the rest of this Amateur Gourmet post »

How I Keep Going To The Gym

There was a tiny period, at the end of 2011 and the start of 2012, when, upon joining a gym for the 300th time, I blogged about this latest attempt at exercise on my Not Food Blog. I wrote about the advantages of a treadmill vs. an elliptical machine (the treadmill forces you to run), what to think about while exercising (the answer: not exercising), and my fear of quitting.

Then, not-so-shockingly, I stopped. People who were reading these dispatches probably thought, “Ah, he quit.” And, based on my history of quitting gyms, these people would have a very legitimate reason to believe that. Only, I didn’t quit the gym, I just quit blogging about it. And, more than 9 months later, I’m still going and–weirdly–kind of enjoying it. And I’m starting to see changes, like the change in my arm you might notice in the photo above. That’s a strong arm! How did I manage that? Here, then, is my advice for those of you who, like me, always quit gyms but want to learn how to stick to it (a pretty essential thing to know if you enjoy eating like I do!).

Click here to read the rest of this Amateur Gourmet post »

Stone Fruit Salads

This summer, if I were the sort of person who named their summers, might be called “The Summer of Stone Fruit.” That’s because, for a good part of it, I’d bring home lots of stone fruit (mostly peaches, but also nectarines and plums) from the West Hollywood Farmer’s Market. I’d put these stone fruits into a bowl on our kitchen counter and, inevitably, the stone fruit would get eaten. It was only last week that I decided that I could do more with stone fruit besides just eat it. Which is when I had the idea to use stone fruit in a salad.

Click here to read the rest of this Amateur Gourmet post »

Food is the New Rock

I had a blast with my friend Zach Brooks and his co-host Chuck P. last week on their podcast, “Food is the New Rock.” (Click those words to go to the podcast.) We talk about my 5th grade performance in “Cats,” my job at Food Network, Giada’s accent, and my classic series Great Moments in Musical Theater Featuring Eggs (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

Quinoa with Leftover Chicken, Roasted Broccoli & Balsamic Vinaigrette

You may not believe me when I tell you this, but I made a quinoa dish two weeks ago that had us smacking our lips in delight. It started, as most great dishes do, with leftovers. Just a leftover roast chicken wrapped in aluminum foil. I had Craig do the ceremonial shredding, because he’s an expert at getting every morsel of meat off the carcass. Lolita stands by and yowls her demands for scraps. Occasionally Craig will toss her one.

Click here to read the rest of this Amateur Gourmet post »

That Joke We All Make At Restaurants

I’ve been thinking a lot about that joke we all make at restaurants. You know the one. We finish everything on our plate and then the server comes over and asks, “How was everything?” and we say, “Oh it was terrible, we really hated it” while smiling mischievously and gesturing towards the empty dish. I bet servers hear that joke all the time. Sure, it comes from a good place; it’s meant to involve the server in a conspiracy of sarcasm. But, really, maybe we should stop making that joke. Or if we do make that joke, maybe we should limit ourselves to once a year. That way servers don’t have to laugh insincerely and we don’t have to pretend that we disliked our dinner.