Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Let me guess...the hostess was actually Rowan Atkinson.

Gino's at 44th and Broadway was always pretty good...Polito's is good, too. These were my usual places.

Rocco is my standby.

This is one of my favorite foods, and although it's not quite how I like it, I can usually make do with Acme's.

My mom is notorious for burning food because she's gotten distracted. It probably happened once a week when I was growing up, which is really a shame because she is a fabulous cook. I recently tried to stew squash (I wanted a taste of home!), and in her instructions, she warned me that they would burn quickly, so keep the flame low and a close eye on them.

I ignored her, as daughters are often wont to do, and lo, I am still scrubbing black residue from the bottom of one of my nice stainless steel pots. And the smell was ridiculous. Lesson learned.

On a funnier note, last June, we tried to bake a chocolate pie together, but we discovered the top element of the oven was out. Enough heat was generated for the pie to set, but it looked rather anemic. My mom's idea: Hey! Let's broil this sucker!

A few minutes later, we had a nice mother/daughter bonding moment while we scraped off the top layer of the pie. It ended up being delicious anyway!

That's it! Thank you! I've read both The Making of a Chef, which was ok, and Heat, which I really enjoyed. I've got Ruhlman's other books in my queue, but I was hoping to read something else food-oriented first.