
I’ve been a blog slacker lately–updating less frequently and, more horrifically, not responding to reader e-mail. If you’ve sent me an e-mail over the past few weeks, I deeply apologize for not getting back to you. With my thesis reading and school ending and the kidney I donated to a nun, things have been quite…

Who is responsible for the lavish meals you see displayed before you on my website? No, I don’t mean financially: financially we owe our gastronomic livelihood to my father who slaves away in his Margate office almost ten hours a day so we can nosh on amuse bouches and petit fores. No, the question I…

I know that on Sunday night we ate dinner at the Gramercy Tavern. I know this to be true but as opposed to Daniel, which I wrote about below this, dinner memories aren’t flooding to the surface. Everything about the Gramercy Tavern was perfectly executed–the hostess was pleasant (and pregnant), the bar room was colorful…

The graduation feasting began Saturday night when mom and dad swept me away to Daniel, a place we’d visited once before but which I longed to return to. “I long to return to Daniel,” I informed mom and dad when they were making reservations. They even offered to take me to Alain Ducasse–that palace of…
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Today I graduate writing school and I officially become a writer. The words you’re reading now are not sanctioned yet–give it a few hours and suddenly you’ll realize how un-degreed these sentences were. I kid, of course, because graduating writing school is not like graduating medical school or (ahem) law school–you can be a practicing…

The word on the street is: “Ramps.” “It’s ramp season,” people will say. “You better buy them now: they don’t last long.” So on this obviously bountiful trip to the farmer’s market (see two posts below this), I couldn’t ignore the several stands selling ramps to innocent bystanders like me. I chose a bunch with…
![Crème fraîche and other words with funny punctuation [PLUS: Creamy Lemon Risotto]](https://amateurgourmet.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/cremefraiche.webp)
Should you have read the post below this first, you will know that on Saturday I visited the farmer’s market–specifically, the Ronnybrook stand–where I procured a jar of milk and a small tub of crème fraîche: Believe it or not, this would be my first crème fraîche ever. (Pronounced, I recently learned the hard way,…

Take a good long look at that picture. Study it, embrace it. What you are about to see, when you click ahead, are all the steps that went into making this dish–the crusty, golden exterior, the deep resonant sauce below: the braised leeks, the browned chicken, the herbed crumbs. This dish was an undertaking but…

New York, NY. April 18, 2006—For foodblogger Adam Roberts, the night started out like any other. “I was crying into my pillow and cursing my existence like I always do,” he told reporters yesterday. “When I suddenly had the urge to make Ina Garten’s toasted coconut marshmallows.” Roberts saw Ms. Garten make these marshmallows on…

The title of this post is deceitful. Roasting a chicken is indeed a simple pleasure, but making a balsamic glazed chicken is slightly more complicated. Not much more complicated–it may still qualify as simple–but this simple guy had an issue. See the beautiful chicken with the crisped skin, browning in the oven? I wish I…