Writing about food since 2004.
Category
Essays
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Does Food Writing Matter?
[Photo credit, Dallas Observer] By this point it’s old news that Sam Sifton, restaurant critic for The New York Times, has stepped down from his job after only two years. It’s a pretty short run for a restaurant critic, and his reasons for stepping down have been explained matter-of-factly: he’s going to become the Times’s…
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Why Cookbooks Are Here To Stay
There’s a lot of talk these days about the future of cookbooks. On Eater National, yesterday, Paula Forbes made the case that “the end of print is in clear sight” and that the only cookbooks that might survive are the “art object” cookbooks, those “huge, photo-heavy tomes.” Maybe I’m naïve, but I find this hard…
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Too Much Decadence
A few weeks ago, I ate a burger at a place called the Roebling Tea Room which my friend Rachel Wharton had written about in Edible Brooklyn. She wrote that Roebling was a chef hang-out with the kind of food that chefs like to eat. And sure enough, when the burger arrived, it was a…
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10 Things That You’re Doing Wrong Hosting a Dinner Party
One of the best things about being a home cook is the opportunity to show off your cooking chops to family, friends and loved ones at a dinner party. Some out there plan dinner parties meticulously; every detail is accounted for, from the crystal that’s to be used for the wine, to the palate cleanser…
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Let’s Talk About Lettuce
I started cooking seven or eight years ago, maybe even a little further back, and it was around the time that people stopped buying whole heads of lettuce and started buying lettuce, pre-washed, in those little plastic tubs. The tubs, which are now omnipresent, have labels like “Spring Salad Mix” and “Herb Salad Mix” and…
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A Proper Tea
On this blog, only one hot, caffeinated beverage gets the love (see: coffee), but what about the other hot, caffeinated beverage? No, not boiled Coke, I’m talking about tea. Funny story: the other day I Tweeted, “I think I’m ready to own a teapot.”
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In Praise of the Two Fat Ladies
Mr. Game Show was a Hanukkah gift that my parents bought me one year in the 1980s. It looked like a regular board game (small tokens that you moved around a large, printed board) except there, in the middle, was a plastic figurine that talked. “Hello!” it announced in a Guy Smiley voice, “I’m Mr.…
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It Gets Better (Cooking for My Boyfriend & Our Families)
When I told my friend Alex that I was cooking a dinner for my parents and Craig’s parents at the end of last week, Alex (who knew me in college) said to me: “Did you ever think, 10 years ago, that this would ever happen? That you’d cook a dinner one day for your parents…
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On Taking Pictures of Your Food
For the past six years, I’ve taken a picture of almost everything I’ve eaten. Yesterday, for example, I took a picture of my lunch. I was at The New French with my friend Diana and I had an interesting salmon salad with escarole and a Muscadet vinaigrette: I took a picture with my cell phone.…
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Ten Rules for Food Blogging
Inspired by this piece in the Guardian, in which several successful fiction writers (including Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, and Jonathan Franzen) give their ten rules for writing fiction, here are my ten rules for food blogging. (I hope my other senior food blogging colleagues write their own ten rules too.) 1. Have a hook. That…
