Oh beautiful for spacious skies / for Thai food made o.k.Memorial Day is a secular Yom Kippur, a day of mourning without the fasting. We honor those who perished at war by toasting on the beach or by floating in a pool. Memorial Day is a serious holiday.Perhaps most notably, Memorial Day is a day…

Katy makes the best pie you’ll ever taste and here’s the movie that shows how she does it. Nectarines seem a strange filling for a pie, sure, but take my word: they work incredibly well.Incidentally, I’m up now at 3:26 am because halfway through editing the film my computer froze and I had to start…

If this website is the theory of gravity and I’m Isaac Newton, Josh is the apple that fell on my head. He’s the one who pushed me, way back when, to start a food blog. “You really should do it,” he said in October, walking with me through a Chili Festival. “Well,” I said, “we’ll…

Aha! Just as I suspected… The Billion Dollar Myth.

Now that I’m a big star, I’m starting to worry that my visage at restaurants is so recognizable that my ability to evaluate might be compromised. So today I went disguise shopping. I didn’t buy any of these things, but I might…A mustache, perhaps?Redneck teeth?Or, my personal favorite, a mullet?A sound investment for a serious…

Today I met my friend Brock for lunch at a place that shall remain nameless, and as I came through the door and saw him standing in line he looked disturbed.”Look,” he said, “there’s a fight going on there.”I turned and saw a man with a baby on his back and a wife next to…

The Floataway Cafe is (well, was) my favorite Atlanta restaurant. Maybe it still is. I’m undecided. Last night’s meal did not work well in its favor.At least the Floataway is conveniently located: it is literally down the street from where I live. If Atlanta is an alphabet and I live in A, the Floataway is…

This one is stretching it: vocally, musically and just–errr–goodily. I can never get the opening riff of this song right and that last note is–errr–a little hard to hit. Forgive me, Jim Morrison. I am no Lizard King.Download “I Cooked A Chicken on the Fire.”

Last week, I asked for your help in my help-seeking post: How Do I Use This Barbeque?.You offered your help. I appreciate that.And so tonight I decided to use the advice you gave to conquer my fear of grilling. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, your Amateur Gourmet conquered the barbeque.It began with a book. A marvelous…

One of the nice things about that contest I threw last week was that one of our losing contestants–(is “losing” too harsh a word? I’m sorry)–one of our miserable failures turned me on to a book I knew nothing about. It was the book she requested should she win the contest. She didn’t win the…