September 22, 2009 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
After yesterday’s cookbook slaughter, I thought I’d steer the blog to sweeter waters and talk about a subject I’ve never addressed on the blog before: my secret cookbook gems.
No, I’m not talking about books that I actually cook from. Those would be my favorite cooking cookbooks and you can find those on the lower right hand corner of the page under the heading “The Amateur Gourmet Recommends.” These books, my secret cookbook gems, are the ones with the most sentimental value: the ones that I cherish the most, the ones I’d grab first if the apartment was on fire.
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September 21, 2009 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
Nobody likes moving. It’s a daunting process: first you have to find boxes, then you have to find packing tape, then you have to put all your stuff in the boxes and then you run out of packing tape and then you find you have more stuff and you need more boxes, etc, etc. It sucks.
Which is why, a few days ago, I found myself staring at my cookbook collection. I was on the couch and there it was, across the room. Six giant Ikea shelves of cookbooks, collected from five and a half years of food blogging. And like a bolt of lightning, a thought singed the inside of my brain: “Do I really need all of these cookbooks? How many do I really use, really?”
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Food52 — It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Amanda Hesser's. I've been cooking her recipes--from her vanilla bean loaves to her carrot fennel soup--for as long as I've been cooking, really. Which is why I'm so delighted that Amanda and her friend Merrill Stubbs have joined our ranks here on the world wide web. Check out their new site Food52: a fun, interactive recipe resource that allows you to submit recipes, vote for recipes and help shape an actual cookbook that'll be published at the end of a year. I really love the videos of Amanda and Merrill cooking together (like this one of them cooking fish): it's refreshing to discover that the authoritative voice behind the New York Times Magazine food section is just a normal person like you and me. With an incredibly nice kitchen.
February 4, 2009 | By Adam Roberts | 21 Comments
Back in May, when Robyn Lee wrote on Serious Eats about the books in the bathroom at Momofuku Ko, the picture she shared showed just a stack of vintage cookbooks (“African Cooking,” “The Cooking of Italy,” “The Cooking of Japan”) and a few fancier books–Michael Bras’s “Essential Cuisine,” Roger Verge’s “Vegetables in the French Style” and Alain Ducasse’s “Grand Livre De Cuisine”–all displayed, rather simply, above the toilet. Now, as you can see from my picture above, the library has grown exponentially: there are three shelves worth of food-related books in there. Enough that you almost wish you’d get food poisoning so you could spend a long time in there, flipping through all of them. Instead, though, I took a few close up pictures so we can examine EXACTLY what’s on those shelves. Here’s what I found.
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June 10, 2008 | By Adam Roberts | 11 Comments
When you’ve been blogging for almost five years and many people read your blog, you start to receive things in the mail. Cookbooks, for example. I get many cookbooks in the mail, also general food books like books about oysters. I have a book about oysters on my shelf that I’ve never read.
Sometimes, though, you get sent something that excites you. And such was the case when I received a preview of Andrew Carmellini’s new cookbook, Urban Italian.
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January 22, 2008 | By Adam Roberts | 26 Comments
I was recently gifted the “Tartine” cookbook; a gorgeous hardcover book with an introduction by Alice Waters and pictures that make you want to lick the page. Those who remember my trip to San Francsico will remember my trip to Tartine (click here) and the delightful frangipane tart I enjoyed.
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September 12, 2007 | By Adam Roberts | 7 Comments
Finally made Clotilde’s signature cake. Can you see the zucchini? You can’t? That’s because it sort of melts as it cooks. That’s important to note because when I first shredded the zucchini, using the food processor, it came out in long strands. I was worried there’d be long strands of zucchini in the finished product so I put in the blade and chopped them all up. But Clotilde assures me that, “size doesn’t matter. The zucchini blends into the texture of the cake, so they can be short or long, whatever’s easiest with the tools you have.”
This is a perfect dessert to make right now with zucchini still so abundant. You can trick yourself into thinking it’s healthy too and justify the giant piece that you cut for yourself, like the piece you see above. Just more proof that Chocolate & Zucchini is a book worth having.
