Writing about food since 2004.
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Pappa al Pomodoro (Or: How To Eat Tomato Sauce and Bread For Dinner)
I’ve been really into tomatoes this summer. Every Sunday I’ve been going to the Atwater Village Farmer’s Market, buying some juicy heirlooms, and using them in sandwiches, salads, tomato baths, you get the idea. You might think that now that August is over, tomato season is on the way out… but you’d be wrong! Most…
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Let’s Try That Again
If you had trouble loading up the blog this week, that’s because, in my naiveté, I thought I could just tear everything down without any consequences. Turns out: I screwed something up with the server and the blog stopped loading for most people. BUT! Now we’re on a new server and things should be working…
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Oh Hi There
Funny story. Recently, I revived (and redesigned) my Hey, Adam Roberts blog, the blog I created when, two years ago, I got my first job as a TV writer and decided to throw in the towel as a food blogger. I wrote a post called “Blogging in 2017,” linked to it on Facebook, and suddenly…
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Spaghetti with Crispy Chickpeas and Preserved Lemon
Tom Colicchio’s always like “you didn’t develop any flavor” on Top Chef and most people are probably like “what’s he talking about?” My quick answer is: “He’s talking about making things brown.” Generally speaking, when you’re cooking something, you want it to turn brown (or, to use a prettier word, you want it to “caramelize.”)…
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When A Frenchman Cooks You Dinner
For a while, our friend Cris has wanted to cook us dinner. The fact that we didn’t make it happen immediately won’t seem like a big deal until I tell you that Cris is French. Yes, we had the opportunity to have dinner cooked for us by a French person and we didn’t take him…
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Oatmeal with Toasted Coconut, Almonds, and Golden Raisins
I’m no oatmeal expert, but I do make a lot of oatmeal. OK, maybe I am an oatmeal expert. For a while, I was toasting the oats in butter (a trick I once wrote about here) which kind of makes the oatmeal taste like buttered popcorn. When I’m feeling indulgent, I’ll cook Irish oats and…
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Meaty Mushrooms on Cheesy Polenta
Mushrooms are scary. Eat the wrong one, and it can kill you or make you think you’re Jesus (luckily, if you think you’re Jesus and it kills you, you can raise yourself from the dead). As a child, I absolutely loathed raw mushrooms in salads at pizza restaurants. That was my first impression of mushrooms:…
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Popping Over To Portland (with Meals at Clyde Common, Sweedeedee, Aviary, Maurice, Ava Gene’s, and Tasty & Alder)
I’m not sure what the sequence was. Let’s say it was this: we were going to Bellingham, Washington for Christmas (as we usually do) and just before we left, Tom Sietsema, of The Washington Post, ranked the best food cities in America and put Portland in at number one. Since Portland’s in between Bellingham and…
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Thinking About Soup (In Memory of Gina DePalma)
On New Year’s Day, I didn’t eat a salad, I didn’t hop on a treadmill, I didn’t write the annual letter to myself that I’ve been writing since I read about doing that in some magazine half a decade ago. This year, I grabbed the giant stock pot that sits on top of my oven…
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When Your Friend Makes Sourdough, You Make Cioppino
My friend Toby grew up in Berkeley and whenever we see each other, we talk about all of the things we might cook together one day. It’s one of those conversations that happens over and over again but the plans never materialize, so at a certain point somebody has to say, “OK, are we doing…
