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[From the 4/14/25 Amateur Gourmet Newsletter] On Saturday, we met our friends Jeremy and Jason for pizza at Oma Grassa in Fort Greene. Eric Kim was raving about it the other night at drinks and since I love pizza, it was kind of a no-brainer. (Though I did realize, after I made the reservation, that…

When you cook a recipe with lots of ingredients, you expect a big impact. So it would follow that cooking a recipe with just a few ingredients would be less impactful; that it would be simple in the way mashed potatoes are simple: straightforward, satisfying, but not complex. And then someone sends you a recipe…

Every so often, I think about my dog and the fact that I could never eat him. Then I think about how he looks like a piglet and how I do eat pigs by way of bacon. But if I do eat bacon and bacon comes from a pig aren’t I eating a version of…

There’s a certain type of cooking that I excel at and it’s called “I just got back from a trip and what do I have in my fridge?” cooking. Usually, when I get back from somewhere, I’m too fatootsed to go food shopping, so I either (a) give in and order take-out from Pine and…

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, we had toast for dinner. Now when I say “toast for dinner,” you may be imagining a stale piece of bread, smeared with a little butter and jam. That wouldn’t be a very filling dinner, now, would it? No, the toasts that I made for dinner were hearty…

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Speaking of being shattered, did I tell you that I shattered my favorite Italian pasta bowl a few weeks ago? Well, someone suggested I go on Replacements.com to find its doppelgänger. I looked at the name of the designer, Richard Ginori, and didn’t find my beloved bowl, but I found so many cool ones, including…

Here’s a friendly tip: make yourself buy an exotic ingredient even if you’re not sure what you’re going to do with it. For example, a few weeks ago I was at the Spice Station in Silverlake and I bought a little bag of white truffle salt. I bought it because after sniffing from the giant…

When I’m home alone and making dinner for myself, my standards change dramatically. If Craig’s there (and he usually is), I know he has certain expectations about what constitutes a dinner. That’s fair, because most people do. But alone? My standards go out the window and I just improvise a meal with whatever I have…

How does dinner happen? It happens in many ways. We ask the person we’re with, “What are you in the mood for?” or we just pick up the phone and dial the Thai place down the street or the pizza place around the corner. Or, if we have the ingredients, we make a quick bowl…