Recipes and food adventures with Adam Roberts
Category
Essays
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What Makes A Great Steakhouse
1. It must be dark, like you’re underground. The consumption of red meat is such a primal, bodily act that darkness–like darkness in the bedroom–opens one up to experience pleasure with reckless abandon. 2. There must be a piano player with a bad toupee singing Neil Diamond songs or a cheesy duo of guitar player…
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Fear of Broilers
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My favorite childhood movie was “The Phantom Tollbooth,” which most people know as a book, but I only know (and insist on knowing) as a movie. Milo, the young protagonist, must travel through Dictionopolis and Digitopolis to make his way to the Castle in the Air to rescue Rhyme and Reason. Only, whenever he says…
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Frank Bruni Responds
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I’m deeply flattered that Frank Bruni took the time to respond to my dress code manifesto on his Diner’s Journal blog (to read his response, click here; to read my original post, click here.) He begins by calling me a “lovely, thoughtful guy” (woohoo!) and then systematically dismantles my argument. I appreciate the logic of…
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Warm Weather Food (A deeply focused, highly intelligent, penetrating essay and not a review of “Sex & The City: The Movie”)
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This is a post about warm weather food only I just got back from “Sex and the City: The Movie” and I’d rather write a post about that. But I will be good and stick to my subject matter, albeit a thin subject. I mean, really what’s there to say about warm weather food when…
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My Favorite Food Movie: Defending Your Life
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Favorite food movies are like days of the week; for all intents and purposes, there are only seven of them. 1. Ratatouille; 2. Eat Drink Man Woman; 3. Tampopo; 4. Chocolat; 5. Babette’s Feast; 6. Big Night; 7. Like Water For Chocolate. [This Serious Eats thread seems to confirm that.] I don’t want to ruffle…
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Food Tastes Better When It Has a Good Story
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We ask many things of our food. We ask that our food is clearly identifiable (anything strange and murky immediately turns us off); we ask that our food is reasonably healthy–even if that means laying a redemptive tomato on a greasy, heart-crushing 5-pound burger. We ask that our food is prepared in a clean kitchen,…
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The Night I Let Friends Cook For Me
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Psychologically speaking, I’m a Jewish mother. I smother those I love with attention, worry, enthusiasm, judgment and, most of all, food. The food bit is a relatively recent development–I wasn’t smothering my high school friends with food–but now that I do cook and cook quite regularly, I have an almost compulsive need to feed others.…
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Food Negation Theory
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I have a theory. If you make spaghetti cacio e peppe for dinner, inspired by “Lidia’s Italy” on PBS–a dish of what is, essentially, spaghetti, pecorino cheese and pepper–you can undo whatever nutritional damage this does to your physique and/or health by eating a tub of green beans at the same time, as illustrated by…
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I Don’t Have A Microwave
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Last night, I cooked a spontaneous lasagna for six friends after which I served them delicious Meyer lemon bars. One of these friends, who we’ll call “Mark,” hadn’t eaten all day and despite all the food I stuffed him with was still hungry. Luckily I had leftover cauliflower pasta from last week in the fridge…
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People Who Eat In
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Yesterday on Grub Street, Josh Ozersky called Bon Appétit magazine “the most boring” of the food rags, “an ad-packed Nembutal calling to mind the ‘women’s pages’ where newspapers used to publish their party recipes.” It was his ultimate conclusion, though, that really caught my attention: “Once a magazine is a repository for recipes, it stops…
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