Recipes and food adventures with Adam Roberts

  • The Day I Was On The Cooking Channel And Didn’t Know It

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    The Day I Was On The Cooking Channel And Didn’t Know It

    This morning I received an e-mail from Brad Parsons (author of an awesome new book about bitters called, appropriately enough, Bitters) that said the following: “I was watching the Suzanne Goin (who I know you adore) special on Food Network (or Cooking Channel?) last night and they had some b-roll of the Hollywood Farmers’ Market…

  • Last Minute Gougères

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    Last Minute Gougères

    On Saturday night, with 45 minutes left to go before our friend Dara was due to drop by for drinks, I made a drastic decision. I decided to make gougères. This seemed like a drastic decision because: (a) I didn’t have the right cheese in my refrigerator and (b) I’d have to dirty the kitchen…

  • How I Fixed The Lighting In My Kitchen

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    How I Fixed The Lighting In My Kitchen

    Last we talked about my L.A. kitchen, I’d mentioned how much I hated the overhead lighting. Fitted with a round, white fluorescent bulb that would be difficult to replace, the resulting light had all the charm of a middle school science lab or the waiting room of a hospital. I tried to time my cooking…

  • Does Food Writing Matter?

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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…

  • Tavern, Wurstküche & Gastronomico

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    Tavern, Wurstküche & Gastronomico

    If you’re writing your doctoral thesis on The Amateur Gourmet, you’ve probably discovered, at this point, the methodology behind my madness. Or, if you haven’t, it works like this: in a given week I take a bunch of pictures. Some of the pictures I take on my iPhone, the others I take with my fancy…

  • Oven Roasted Hamburgers

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    Oven Roasted Hamburgers

    What if you could make hamburgers for your whole family in a matter of minutes, without dirtying your stove or having to light a grill? That’s the beauty of this game-changing recipe from Molly Stevens and her latest book, “All About Roasting.” I’ve been a huge fan of Molly Stevens ever since I bought her…

  • What You Can Do With A Kaboucha Squash

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    What You Can Do With A Kaboucha Squash

    At the farmer’s market, when I bought those chanterelles, I also spied a Kaboucha squash. It’s a pretty squash, as you can see from the picture; the kind of thing that you might use to decorate your kitchen in the fall. (And here in Los Angeles, where things aren’t so autumnal, I can use all…

  • My First Chanterelles

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    My First Chanterelles

    It’s a known fact that chefs prize chanterelles more than any other mushrooms. In one of the cookbooks that I own (I forget which one), the chef/author instructs: “If you ever see chanterelles, buy them.” And so it was that when I first saw chanterelles at the Hollywood farmer’s market more than a week ago,…

  • Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

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    Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

    Until I get a cease and desist letter from Kim Boyce, whose book “Good To The Grain” inspired me to buy six different kinds of flours last week (that led to a spelt olive oil cake with bittersweet chocolate), I’m going to keep blogging my experiences cooking from her book. The good news is that…

  • Chicken Fat Fried Potatoes

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    Chicken Fat Fried Potatoes

    It occurred to me last Thursday that one of the best recipes in my repertoire isn’t even something that I consider a recipe. It’s a thing that I’ve done for years and years–I talked about it in my video “How To Roast a Chicken”–and, yet, when I look at it by itself, separate from the…