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The Ten Most Recent Posts By Adam Roberts

From Required Eating

David Kamp: The Serious Eats Interview, Part 2

Editor's note: We've long been fans of David Kamp's work (author of The United States of Arugula and, now, along with Marion Rosenfeld, The Food Snob's Dictionary), so we turned loose Adam Roberts on him for a chat. What follows is the second part of a lengthy but entertaining interview. Here's Part One, if you missed it.

One of the things I found most fascinating in the book was the idea of objectivity and subjectivity and Giorgio DeLuca's discovery that food can be objectively good. How do you feel about that subject? Do you feel that good food can be objectively good or is it always a matter of taste?

People obviously have different preferences. But the idea that some food is good and some food isn't good—I kind of agree with DeLuca. It is kind of objective. I don't begrudge people their taste if they don't like Szechuan food. But the idea, or what DeLuca was saying, is that in America we're taught to be populist in a really dumb way. That there's good populism and bad populism. But to be populist in a dumb way is to say that Kraft Singles are just as good as Humboldt Fog. No, sorry, certain cheeses are much better than others. A really good chicken is much better than that dried-out Perdue stuff. It's one thing people are catching on to now is that you can actually care more about your food. There was almost a stigma to that for a while—it was an act of sedition to care too much about your food. It seemed un-American and oddly Frenchlike.

One issue that raises for me is the idea of class. If you can afford to get the best of everything, you can eat well, but if you can't afford it can you eat well?

Julia Child was someone who basically said you can just go to the supermarket and make all her recipes. And she's absolutely right that you can. You can do her recipes with cheap chicken. But that said, I think the very fact that farmers' markets are going way up in number and that your average chain supermarket, whether it's an A & P or a Wegman's, is slowly starting to resemble a Whole Foods or Dean and DeLuca in their produce and the quality of meat. It's an indication that Americans are changing. When you talk about the best of everything, I'm not talking about high-end foods like caviar or truffles. I'm talking about paying a little more for a better-quality chicken or a Niman Ranch steak instead of an agribusiness steak pumped full of hormones. That's not the best of everything, that's simply better quality. And, yes, that costs a bit more, but it cuts across class lines that people are embracing that kind of eating. That's what Michael Pollan argues. In other areas of our lives we care about quality—if we're buying a new DVD set, we'll pay $50 more because it's better quality. So why should it be that when it comes to what we're putting into our mouths and into our bodies that we'll buy the cheapest thing possible?

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From Required Eating

David Kamp: The Serious Eats Interview

Editor's note: We've long been fans of David Kamp's work (author of The United States of Arugula and, now, along with Marion Rosenfeld, The Food Snob's Dictionary), so we turned loose Adam Roberts on him for a chat. What follows is the first part of a lengthy but entertaining interview. Read Part Two here.

Let's start with The United States of Arugula. How did the book come about?

I'm not a food writer by vocation, I'm more of a generalist culture writer for Vanity Fair and GQ. Basically, I love food: I found that it was my off-duty passion. Either cooking or shopping for food at markets or thinking about food and reading about food. Particularly, I noticed that when I was really in the unwinding mode, the thing that I found the most relaxing after a long, taxing day was doing food prep with some nice music on—shelling beans or trimming some haricots verts. And the other thing that I found incredibly relaxing is that moment when, if you're lucky, 30 to 45 minutes before you pass out in bed after an exhausting day, when you're actually reading in bed, I always found I was reading A. J. Libeling or M. F. K. Fisher. I realized this is something I want to write about more—how did we get to this point where we've gotten more savvy, more sophisticated, more knowledgeable about food than Americans from 20, 30, 40, and 50 years ago.

Were you always interested in food? Or did that happen later in life?

I come from a middle class family, but we were always a little more aware of food than others. I grew up in New Jersey, and my mom was a very good cook, and some of my earliest memories are—I was the youngest of three, so when the older two were in school, I was still in my toddler days, she would have Julia Child and Graham Kerr on all the time. Do you know who Graham Kerr is? You're young, I know.

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From Talk

Truffle Butter Chicken?

So my local grocery store sells D'Artagnan truffle butter right next to the D'Artagnan chicken. I was thinking of rubbing this truffle butter all over the chicken, getting some under the skin by the breast, and sprinkling with salt and pepper--maybe stuffing with rosemary--and roasting at 400. Would that be good? How would you do it?

From Talk

How do you grill when you don't have a grill?

In the summer, all the magazines, TV shows and cookbooks espouse the joys of grilling. But I live in a tiny Brooklyn apartment with no yard: what are my options? Should I get a grill pan? Buy a portable grill and bring it to a park? How do you grill when you don't have a grill?

From Required Eating

Waitering, Part Two

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Photograph from iStockphoto.com

Note: This is the second of two parts. Read Part One here.

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From Required Eating

Waitering, Part One

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Photograph from iStockphoto.com

Yoga led me to waitering.

Let me explain. It was the second semester of my senior year of college (Emory, in Atlanta) and I had almost enough credits to graduate. In fact, the only credit I needed to graduate was a P.E. credit. Which was one credit. So I signed up for yoga and once a week for one hour I had to do yoga and that was it. My parents, not surprisingly, weren’t too happy.

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From Required Eating

Fully Stocked

My First Chicken Stock
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Photograph from iStockphoto.com

There once was a boy who bought his chicken stock in a box, no questions asked, and used this boxed stock in every recipe he cooked that required chicken stock. Did he stop to think about making his own stock from scratch? He didn't. He said to himself, "Why should I spend three hours simmering chicken bones and water? This boxed stock is fine, and this dinner will be fine, and anyone who thinks different gets a zero in my book."

OK, confession time, that boy was me. I am a chicken stock skeptic, a perpetual purchaser of those colorful boxes, the ones that help you save time and make a complicated recipe like risotto a cinch to pull off. Sure, it'd be nice to have homemade stock around to cook with, but I'm an impulsive person, and I rarely know what I'm going to make for dinner until the last minute. If I decide to make something that requires stock, I never have time to make it from scratch. And, so far, I've been living a very happy life as a consumer of store-bought chicken stock.

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From Required Eating

My First Recipe

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Photograph by Adam Roberts

“This is a really big step: you should be really proud.”

I’m talking to Molly Stevens, author of my new favorite cookbook—All About Braising—and she’s patting me on the back for something I haven’t done yet.

“When you don’t use recipes anymore, when you call on your own techniques, that’s when you can call yourself a chef,” she says. “Coming up with your own recipe is a big moment in your development.”

What Molly doesn’t know and what the voices in my head keep reminding me is that this big step I’m about to take is one I’m not ready for. Like some kid who likes to dive in the family pool and then enters the Olympics, I am in over my head.

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From Required Eating

Bagel Love

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Photo credit: iStockphoto.com

If you chopped my arm off with an axe, you might be surprised to see that the stump that remained had a giant hole in it. That’s because my body is made of bagels. I am 70 percent water, 30 percent bagels. No week passes in my life without the consumption of at least one or more bagels. If I go for more than a week without a bagel, my hair falls out, my eyes turn black, and I start chanting strange Kabbalic verses that’d make Madonna’s head spin. Luckily, I live in New York City, so unless someone kidnaps me and ties me to a chair and feeds me a constant stream of ham and mayonnaise to un-Jew me, I will never be without a bagel. And thank God, because bagels are my favorite day food. (As opposed to my favorite night food, which is pasta. But that’s another subject.)

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From Required Eating

Bathroom Fixtures and Fairy Cakes

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Illustration: iStockphoto.com; photographs: Adam Roberts

I'm on the phone with my dad, and I'm lying.

"I'm about to put together a bathroom fixture," I say while flipping through Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess.

"Good!" my dad says. "That'll be good for you."

The bathroom fixture sits in a bag from Target near the door. The fixture is a two-shelf wall mount that we need because our bathroom sink is scattered with hair brushes, contact-lens solution, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and other bathroom miscellany.

"It's messy because there's no storage," is the justification my roommate, Diana, and I often make. But the solution is simple: Buy a bathroom fixture, put it together, mount it on the wall, and clean off the sink. And this is what I intend to do, but Nigella is calling to me, whispering two words over and over again: "Fairy cakes. Fairy cakes."

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The Ten Most Recent Comments By Adam Roberts

From Required Eating

Amateur Gourmet Adam Roberts Revealed as Semi-Pro in New Book

Hi Dominic,
Thanks for snagging the book! Before I was The Amateur Gourmet I would eat frozen California Pizza Kitchen pizzas by the caseload; I'd make those Pilsbury cinnamon buns for a treat; I made a decent chili. But mostly I'd eat out, order in, very rarely cook at home. Amazing how much has changed in just a few years...
Adam

From Required Eating

The Serious Eats Fried Clam Honor Roll

Ed, it just so happens that I had Brooklyn Fish Camp's fried clams just a few days ago. I found them perplexing. They were whole steamer clams with the little bootie still on, the whole thing fried so it looked a bit like a giant sperm. They paled in comparison to the fried clams I had at The Clam Shack (I must've gone there on a better day than David Leite). I much prefer Brooklyn Fish Camp's Oyster Po' Boy and Trout BLT.

From Ed Levine Eats

Thai Restaurant Hunting This Weekend

Wondee Siam II has a terrific duck salad. It's almost like duck bacon mixed in with chiles and pineapple and cilantro and all sorts of goodies. I highly recommend it.

From Required Eating

Tap that Glass

This is the best post title ever.

From Talk

Venice restaurant recommendations

Trattoria Alla Madonna. That's the first place we went to when we got to Venice and it was fantastic and totally memorable. Really fresh seafood--I still remember the seafood risotto I had--and not touristy at all. Also, don't miss the Peggy Guggenheim museum when you're there. It's off the beaten track, but really cool. Another tip is to go to Mario Batali's site and check out his Italy picks--I'm sure he has a section on Venice.

From Talk

"Sopranos" Finale Party?

I may try Mario Batali's lasagna with the homemade pasta dough. Could be too ambitious though--but the occasion is probably worth it!

From Talk

Do you share your real identity on your blog? Why or why not?

I'd never reveal anything about myself--too dangerous!

From Required Eating

Cooking With Liberace!

Ok, I'm sorry but somebody has to make a joke about Liberace and sticky buns.

Thank you.

From Talk

What Happened to the AG?

Lou, I actually agree with your feedback on that post---I'm here in San Fran and trying to blog as much as I can about my trip, while at the same time not wanting to spend too much time on the net when I could be out doing things. So I write posts like that almost like an e-mail--I re-read them once and click post without too much fussing over it. It's just a choice I make and for the most part my readers don't seem to mind.

The work I do for Serious Eats, on the other hand, I do spend lots of time on. And my book, you'll be surprised to see when it comes out, has gone through almost a year of editing---I've been revising, reworking, reshaping, rethinking each chapter so much that you may not even recognize the work as my own. That's because it's just a different medium.

It's funny, Livetotravel started this thread and then slammed me in the video section and slammed me elsewhere too, and then I clicked on my site because "Livetotravel" sounded familiar, and after doing a search I see Livetotravel's left 121 comments on my blog over the course of more than a year. Quite a lot for someone who hates me and my writing.

From Talk

What Happened to the AG?

Well hello---I'm surprised to read some of the comments in this thread. There's been no break-up between myself and Serious Eats: I'm currently working on re-designing my site and temporarily took down the Serious Eats widget while trying to figure out how to clean things up. With the new Serious Eats format (with more focus put on blog updates) I'll now be writing one column a month; but, as someone pointed out above, this week will bring a new contribution from me---I'll let you be surprised.

As for my writing, I've studied writing from my first year of college, when I declared a Creative Writing major, to the two years of writing grad school I did at NYU where I did a masters thesis with Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Norman. There are lots of ways to evaluate writing: you can look at grammar, you can look at sentence structure, you can look at the nuts and bolts and ignore the larger edifice. I consider myself a stylist more than anything else: I like to tell stories in an idiosyncratic way. Those who like my writing (and that group includes Michael Ruhlman, Ed Levine, Regina Schrambling--all of whom are blurbing my book) admire it because there's lots of life to it. That's what I do. And, if I may say so, many of the blogs that I find dull and off-putting are blogs with no life to them. You can grammar check and spell check all you want, but if your writing is dull, no one care's how much Strunk and White you've digested.

Graham--I'm surprised that you said what you said in a public forum where I'd be likely to read it. That's nice that your editor friend thinks my writing's a "train wreck," I'll keep my thoughts about your writing to myself.

Responses to Comments by Adam Roberts

From Videos

Hamburger America: Dyer's Burgers

I grew up in Memphis and was introduced to Dyer's while in college back in the late 70's. Since serious academia was hand in hand with prolific dopesmoking, a Dyer's visit could take the edge off the munchies like nothing else (except maybe a throbbing Broadway Pizza). It was in the tiny shack on Cleveland, and the skillet of grease sat there at the front, bubbling like a tar pit, supposedly unchanged since 1912. The big deal was the double double, which was always nearly dunked in the grease, bun and all, unless you stopped them from doing it.

On many afternoons, the place was patronized by some of the local Memphis wrestlers like Professor Tanaka and Tojo Yamamoto, who would put away a couple of triple triples and a six pack of Schlitz, then they'd get in the Professor's bigass Lincoln and go to their match up the road.

I remember their onion was the hottest onion I've ever had, but it was perfect for these burgers. they were remarkably non-greasy, very flavorful. The new places may have co-opted the history, but they can't stand up to the original.

From Required Eating

Eggs Benedict Arnold

Glo's is my favorite breakfast joint in Seattle, and I have tried most of them. FYI, Adam, the Eggs Benedict at Crave is pretty fantastic too! They make a mimosa hollandaise that is amazing. Their Crave omlette with rosemary, duck confit, and goat cheese is also worth a try!

From Required Eating

The Serious Eats Fried Clam Honor Roll

I have to make a comment about Christies, not sure the last time you went there, but let me tell you it was absolutely horrible when I went. In was the only one in there on a very nice Summer day. If that wasn't scary enough, when I order my clams I got enough to even close the box. They were horrible, greasy and god knows how long the oil was there. I think they need to close it not fry clams or anything else for the matter. In all do fairness maybe it was a bad day, but looking at that parking lot it must be a bad day every. Give me Kelly's on the beach of Revere, they have been around for ever and they are delcious.

From Talk

Do you share your real identity on your blog? Why or why not?

I share a great deal on my myspace page - and I sometimes pay the price for it. However, lunatics aside, I refuse to change the way I live my life because if I do, they win. And that's unacceptable.

From Required Eating

The Serious Eats Fried Clam Honor Roll

Pearls is amazing, Our weekly treat. Worth the hour wait. Great service, Consistent. Lobster rolls out of this world.
Bigows excellent... FYI the french fries are not frozen. Always fresh at Bigelows.

From Ed Levine Eats

Thai Restaurant Hunting This Weekend

Made third and final visit to Wondee Siam III. One mediocre meal, two terrible. Should have stopped after first disaster.

Drunken noodle dish was likely product of drunken chef, or at least of man not in control of his blowtorch (burned noodles tasted of gas).

Decor is pretty good and plating is lovely, especially by Yorkville standards, but little foot traffic and bad front of house management translate into hovering waiters, poor pacing and uncomfortable lunch time atmosphere.


From Required Eating

Amateur Gourmet Adam Roberts Revealed as Semi-Pro in New Book

Not to be cantankerous, but I have to chuckle at the characterization of Barnes & Noble as a local bookstore and the thought that shopping there makes a local impact (aside from any sales tax that you might pay). In fact, Barnes & Noble (BKS) is the largest publicly traded traditional bookstore listed on the NYSE!

I don't feel bad about ordering from Amazon -- I can take the money I saved there ($6 on this book compared to buying it at B&N) and spend it at my local coffee shop instead of Starbucks!

From Required Eating

Amateur Gourmet Adam Roberts Revealed as Semi-Pro in New Book

I've enjoyed your blog for a long time -- and introduced my blog-fearing mother to your site via Lolita's video clip ("A Message From Lolita") -- and it's been great following your progress from Atlanta law student to NY playwright-in-training to pretty much full-time Amateur Gourmet. I went to my local Barnes & Noble to buy your book the day it came out, thinking I'd like to make a local impact, rather than just being one of the throngs ordering from Amazon... as a new mom, I'm reading as much as I can while nursing the little one, and I find your book just delightful. I love how you weave your friends into all your stories -- they become major characters in your development as the Amateur Gourmet, and spice up each chapter with wit and humanity.
Kudos to you, and a skritch to Lolita!

From Required Eating

Amateur Gourmet Adam Roberts Revealed as Semi-Pro in New Book

I finished reading your book this a.m. I thoroughly enjoyed the adventure of each chaper, could easily identify with many of your friends as well as the situations your shared. No questions---just a warm thank you for reminding me the importance of nourishing myself daily. Splendid job!

From Required Eating

Amateur Gourmet Adam Roberts Revealed as Semi-Pro in New Book

Hi Adam:

Errrr, regarding the Clean Is Happy ad on your blog. What happened to good ole godliness or even goddessliness?

Work with me on this. If I'm thinking about food...forget it.

Congrats on the new book.

URBivore