• Scenes From The Skeleton Twins Premiere

    Scenes From The Skeleton Twins Premiere

    Well, it happened, and you guys made it happen. The Skeleton Twins “won” the weekend according to IndieWire; it was the #1 film in 12 out of the 15 theaters where it played. Now it’s expanding to more cities–Seattle, Minneapolis, Dallas, Boston, San Diego, Palo Alto and San Jose next week–and will continue to grow…

  • Go See The Skeleton Twins!

    Go See The Skeleton Twins!

    Friends, Romans, Countrymen: the time is now! If you live in New York, L.A., D.C., San Francisco, Chicago, I need you to do me a favor right now: open a new window in your browser, go to one of those movie ticket sites–Fandango, for example–and load up The Skeleton Twins and then get your tickets…

  • Leftover Panzanella Cake with a Fried Egg

    Leftover Panzanella Cake with a Fried Egg

    Resourcefulness is a quality that emerges gradually as you get more comfortable in the kitchen. At first, you might make a panzanella salad–with big chunks of toasted bread, heirloom tomatoes, garlic, a little anchovy, some basil, olive oil, and red wine vinegar–eat most of it and then throw the rest away because panzanella doesn’t really…

  • Penne with Bacon and Flageolet Beans

    Penne with Bacon and Flageolet Beans

    What’s with me and pasta? No, seriously, I’m really asking: how can I eat so much of it and never get tired of it? Sometimes I think it’s my own personal Rosebud, because my earliest food-related memories involve sitting at a little yellow plastic table on a gray carpet in front of the big TV,…

  • Banana Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting

    Banana Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting

    Finding out someone’s favorite color doesn’t do much for me. “Oh teal? How interesting,” I say as I fall asleep standing up, collapsing into a heap and waiting for someone to kick me awake. But finding out someone’s favorite flavors is a different story. For my friend Michael’s birthday dinner, this past weekend, I texted…

  • Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Nectarine Blackberry Crisp

    Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Nectarine Blackberry Crisp

    Wow, that’s a mouthful, but you have to admit it sounds good. I got the idea from the New York Times Cooking newsletter; Kim Severson was guest writing it for the day and she mentioned a trick she learned from our mutual friend Bill Addison who learned it from Nancy Silverton (how’s that for a…

  • How To Eat Crow (Or: Kristin Puts Me In My Place About Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breasts and Pizza at Home)

    How To Eat Crow (Or: Kristin Puts Me In My Place About Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breasts and Pizza at Home)

    When someone has a target on your head, it can be a scary thing. But ever since I wrote that article “Ten Things You Should Never Serve At A Dinner Party,” Craig’s sister Kristin has been out to get me. She first made herself known in the comments: “Dear Amateur Gourmet,Allow me to introduce you…

  • Jasper White’s Corn Chowder

    Jasper White’s Corn Chowder

    Recipes, sometimes, are like dreams. You experience them but then, quite often, you forget that you’ve experienced them. And then you’re standing somewhere, and the memory floods back to you: “I was being chased by a gorilla through Filene’s Basement!” Or, in this case, “I once made a corn chowder so good that I wrote…

  • A Summer Feast for Todd and Jim

    A Summer Feast for Todd and Jim

    So remember that time that Jim Parsons and his partner Todd Spiewak made my rainbow cookie cake for Jesse Tyler Ferguson and his partner Justin Mikita? Well, since then, Jim and I have been e-mailing and trying to figure out a time for him and Todd to come over for dinner. We finally picked a…

  • End-of-Summer Plum Cobbler

    End-of-Summer Plum Cobbler

    It’s time to face facts: summer’s almost over. At least summer in the sense of kids not being in school (most of them have already gone back) and summer blockbusters (I didn’t want to see “Guardians of the Galaxy” but someone told me there’s a talking tree in it so now I do) and summer…