Writing about food since 2004.
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Brunch at Flatbush Farm
Brunch, more than any other meal, celebrates abundance. We don’t want one pancake when we go to brunch, we want a stack of glistening, syrup-coated chocolate-stuffed pancakes. Yet one pancake–a solitary, singular pancake–is one of the peculiarities you’ll find on the brunch menu at Flatbush Farm, a lovely neighborhood gastropub in Park Slope.
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Bring Me The Head of Roasted Cauliflower
Here’s a secret for successful cooking: follow your urge. Too often we punish ourselves with recipes that are supposed to be good for us or easy to do instead of trusting the greatest tool we have, the little voice in our head that tells us what we’re hungry for. If you have a craving for…
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The New Amateur Gourmet
Hey! What’s going on? Why does everything look so different? WHAT’S HAPPENING? Welcome to the new Amateur Gourmet. The people you see above you are the brilliant people responsible for what you see around you. That’s Ben on the left–he’s the programmer who worked the HTML like a maestro–and that’s Leah on the right, the…
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Feeling Grand on Grand Street at Pho Grand
I finally did it. I’ve lived in Park Slope for 10 months now and every time I take the D train into the city I promise myself that one day, when it stops on Grand Street, I will get out and eat lunch. You’d thing that a food obsessed person like me would’ve done that…
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Liver and Let Die (Chicken Livers with Leeks, Balsamic Vinegar, and Dried Apricots)
It’s summer. It’s hot. Most people, hot in summer, do not crave liver. I didn’t mean to crave liver. In actuality, I haven’t eaten much liver in my life. I’ve eaten chopped liver–but that seems like a different thing: masked by egg and onions, eating chopped liver at a deli and eating a whole chicken…
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James Felder Reviews Wakiya
James Felder has his finger on the pulse of Manhattan dining with this scoopy review of Wakiya. Thanks James for sending it our way! There’s been a lot of negative buzz around Wakiya. I can honestly say, the place ain’t bad. But I won’t be back. I went with my mother for a Sunday meal…
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A New Design Is Coming
What’s that whisper in the wind? Voices are calling, they’re singing out: “A new day is here…a new dawn for The Amateur Gourmet.” What will this new day entail? What’s going to happen to the site? When’s it going to happen? Will it be today? Tomorrow? It may not be until the middle of next…
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Get Away to Kennebunkport
The perfect weekend getaway is one that makes you feel like you’ve been gone for months. That’s how I felt this Sunday night when I came back from a brief trip to Kennebunkport with my friends Patty, Diana and James. We’d only been there 36 hours–we left early Saturday morning (7 am) and returned late…
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How To Make Broccoli and Cauliflower Bad For You (and utterly delicious)
This is a recipe from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, a cookbook I’ve long dismissed as too complex, too fussy, too–well–not me. Flipping through it now, the recipes are long-winded, they go on for pages, and the pictures are too few and far between. And yet this is a cookbook that has something to say–I can’t…
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Let’s Make Our Cookies Bigger
People of the world, aren’t you tired of tiny cookies? You know the kind I’m talking about. They’re the kind that you end up making when a recipe says, “Drop cookie batter by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets.” That’s what the recipe says for Nestle’s Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies, which I made again tonight (here’s…
