Recipes and food adventures with Adam Roberts

  • Rigatoni with Sausage and Butternut Squash

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    Rigatoni with Sausage and Butternut Squash

    Over my twenty years of doing The Amateur Gourmet, I’ve been approached by fans a handful of times. Usually the exchange is quick and pleasant: I feel a thrill for being recognized and hopefully they feel a thrill for meeting their favorite nerdy, gay, old-school food blogger. However the exchange goes, I’m always on the…

  • Raoul’s

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    Raoul’s

    There’s forced cool and there’s real cool. Raoul’s in SoHo, which has been around for fifty years, is the real deal. I grabbed a five PM reservation yesterday before seeing a show at The SoHo Playhouse, not really knowing much about what to expect except that Raoul’s always shows up on lists of SoHo’s best…

  • Espresso Tahini Granola

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    Espresso Tahini Granola

    Here’s how I know if I need to buy a cookbook or if I can put it safely back on the shelf: I open to three random recipes and if those three recipes look really, really good — like ones I’ll actually be excited to make — it’s a keeper. And that’s how it was…

  • Balthazar

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    Balthazar

    Not to toot my own horn, but Balthazar — one of the most beloved, important restaurants in New York City — features a quote from me on their Press Page: “At its best, I think it’s New York’s most authentic French bistro, and if you catch it at the right moment you can find yourself…

  • Marbled Pumpkin Bread

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    Marbled Pumpkin Bread

    There’s are certain cheats that are universally acknowledged as acceptable by food people and one of them is that it’s totally fine to use canned pumpkin in place of fresh pumpkin in baking recipes. I realize a lot of you are rolling your eyes at that: “Who in their right mind would ever trouble to…

  • The Burger Joint 2.0

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    The Burger Joint 2.0

    One of our favorite New York secrets, back when we lived here in the early aughts, was nestled behind a red velvet curtain in the lobby of The Parker Meridian hotel. If you were going to see a show or a concert at Carnegie Hall, you’d walk through the ornate marble lobby and, against all…

  • Garam Masala Miso Chicken Thighs with Fennel

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    Garam Masala Miso Chicken Thighs with Fennel

    Back in 2004, when I first became interested in cooking but didn’t have the money to buy all of the cookbooks I wanted, I would take index cards to Borders (remember Borders?) and copy down recipes by hand that I could make later. I remember frantically scribbling down The Barefoot Contessa’s Herbal Iced Tea recipe…

  • Quince Preserves

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    Quince Preserves

    My first awareness of quince came from the movie White Men Can’t Jump when Rosie Perez, whose character dreamed of going on Jeopardy, memorized “Foods That Start with the Letter Q.” (Besides “quince” there was “quail,” “quiche,” and “quahog.” Not sure of the fifth!) But I didn’t eat a quince — or cook a quince…

  • Pasta Night

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    Pasta Night

    I first met Renato Poliafito on April 22nd, 2009. I know that because I wrote a post about it when my friend Josh and I trekked out to Red Hook to visit the beloved bakery, Baked, that he ran with his pal Matt Lewis. We immediately hit it off: not just because we both love…

  • How to Make the Perfect Apple Pie (Step-by-Step with Photos)

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    How to Make the Perfect Apple Pie (Step-by-Step with Photos)

    First things first: there’s no such thing as the perfect apple pie. The perfect apple pie is whichever apple pie you love the most. That said: there are good apple pies and there are bad apple pies. Bad apple pies have a stiff, flavorless crustl a gooey, gloppy, synthetic filling. and they taste like something…