Right before Maurice Sendak died, he did a series of interviews (most notably with Stephen Colbert) that revealed him to be a lovable, slightly grouchy, artist of the highest caliber. I’d known his work, of course, from Where The Wild Things Are and, perhaps more obscurely, Really Rosie but I’m embarassed to say I knew nothing about In The Night Kitchen until I read it standing up, recently, at The Strand in New York.
I hate repeating myself on my blog, so if you’ve been reading for me a while, you know that Joe is my favorite coffee shop in New York. The location on Waverly is where I wrote my first book and most of my second; it’s where I’d meet friends to chat about projects or lives, it’s where I first laid eyes on Craig before we started dating. The place positively glows with good energy and the coffee is always top-notch, some might say (and I’d agree with them) the best in town.
Now Jonathan Rubinstein and his sister Gabrielle have collaborated with food writer Judith Choate on “Joe: The Coffee Book,” a charming collection of essays and pictures and how-tos that demystifies the process of making excellent coffee at home. What follows is a Q&A with Jonathan about the book, the process of writing it, and how he stays relevant in a city swarming with new coffee shops.
Flipping through the pages of the new Serious Eats Book, I’m in total awe. It’s the kind of book that could only be written by a team of passionate, ambitious food folk–the kind of people who care very deeply about issues like “What’s the best pizza in the country?” (#1 on their list: Apizza Scholls in Portland, OR) or “What are the various regional burger styles?” (the list includes smashed burgers, steamed cheeseburgers, cheese-stuffed burgers, and so on). Led by the spirited Ed Levine, the Serious Eats team have assembled a book choc full of great advice on where to eat, how to eat and what to eat (including many brilliant recipes developed by the incomparable J. Kenji Lopez-Alt). Now TWO OF YOU lucky Amateur Gourmet readers are going to receive a free copy of the Serious Eats book. To win, simply put your name, location and favorite local haunt (a Serious Eats-worthy destination) in the comments with a one-sentence description that makes me hungry. Make sure to enter a valid e-mail address too so I can notify you if you win (I’ll post the winners here tomorrow morning in this same post). Good luck!
UPDATE: The contest is over! All of your submissions made me hungry, but the two that made me the hungriest were Angela Shepard’s (pork belly sandwich at Butcher in New Orleans) and Broderick’s (baked farm egg in a bath of celery cream at Miller-Union in Atlanta). Congrats to the winners.
The blender arrived in the middle of our conversation.
Kim Severson, of The New York Times, was interviewing me for a story about crowdsourcing recipes (I didn’t have much to contribute but I was excited to chat with Kim for the first time) and in the middle of our lively chat, my doorbell rang.
Today’s the second day of Hanukkah and as much as I wish I could tell you that I’m frying latkes and spinning dreidels and unwrapping Hanukkah gelt in celebration, I’m actually sitting here next to a pile of cookbooks trying to figure what constitutes the Best of 2009. You see, many of my food blogging contemporaries–David, Deb, Eat Me Daily–have already offered up their take on what you should buy for you and yours this holiday season and now it’s my turn to separate the wheat from the chaff or the sour cream from the apple sauce (latke joke!). Are you ready for some hardcore gift-buying ideas? Come along with me.
Several years ago, when I went to Paris, I rode the Metro from my teensy hotel in the 80th arrondissement, to meet a food blogger I admired but had never met, Mr. David Lebovitz. As I came up the stairs (or was it an escalator?) I beheld a vision: there, standing before me, was a smiley man holding what looked to be the world’s largest picnic basket. David toured me around and I made a video, which you can watch here (sorry for the song choice! (what was I thinking??)):
“Write what scares you.”
That’s the kind of directive you’ll get in college creative writing classes, interactive online workshops and, believe it or not, grad school. You’ll get it from the old pros and you’ll get it from frustrated young upstarts: “write what scares you.” David Lindsay Abaire is a prolific playwright with many hilarious plays under his belt, “Fuddy Meers” and “Kimberly Akimbo” among them. But it wasn’t until a mentor advised him to write what scared him most that he wrote what many consider his greatest play, “Rabbit Hole.” He was duly rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize.
How does a Craig Claiborne become a Craig Claiborne?
The best part of Craig Claiborne’s autobiography, “A Feast Made for Laughter,” a long out-of-print book that I picked up at Bonnie Slotnick’s used cookbook store in the West Village, is that the man himself–a man whose impact on American gastronomy is undeniable, whose tenure at The New York Times set the bar for all food journalism and criticism that followed–is that he himself doesn’t know.
It’s a brave book, a searing self-study, and yet it never fulfills its promise: how does a boy from Sunflower Mississippi, who notoriously shared a bed with his father when his family lost all their money, whose teacher called him a sissy in front of the whole class for not playing sports, whose relationship with his mother was so fraught that he eventually cut all ties with her completely become the preeminent food authority in the United States? How does a boy who’s so poor he walks to school every day, mortified that someone he knows will offer him a ride, go on to eat a $4000 dinner that makes the front page of The New York Times and is ultimately denounced by the Pope?
