When I was twelve years old, my parents moved us from Oceanside, New York, to Boca Raton, Florida, into a coral-colored house that had four ovens. I like to joke that my mom, a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, used two of those ovens to store her handbags and the other two to store her shoes. Suffice it to say, my family didn’t cook.
When people ask me, then, how I came to be a food writer, I have a simple answer: “I went to law school.”
It was in law school, after long, dull days discussing promissory estoppel and res ipsa loquitur, that I found myself standing in my kitchen, craving some sort of visceral release. That release came when I chopped my first onion, threw it into a pot with ground beef, cumin, chili powder, and a can of tomatoes, and made chili from a Betty Crocker cookbook. My roommate at the time told me that it looked like dog food, but that didn’t matter: I was hooked on cooking.
Ten years later, I’m still hooked. And the lifeline I threw myself in my third year of law school—a food blog that I started called The Amateur Gourmet—is now my full-time profession, a way to document my adventures as an enthusiastic eater and a passionate home cook.
Since starting my blog (and despite my upbringing), I’ve discovered that I have some talent in the kitchen. Friends clamor for a seat at my table, where I serve them piles of super-garlicky Caesar salad, steaming bowls of pasta, and hacked-apart pieces of aggressively seasoned roast chicken. Homemade chocolate-chip cookies are de rigueur in my house, and every so often, I try my hand at an apple pie. (I’m better at cookies.)
As much as I enjoy making these comfort foods, more often than not I’m stumped in the kitchen when it comes to taking everything to the next level—making the pasta from scratch, for example, or knowing (and understanding) the proper way to truss a chicken. Luckily for me, over the course of writing my blog, I’ve had the chance to meet a wide variety of chefs, many of whom are incredibly generous when it comes to answering my cooking questions.
Which is how I got the idea for this book.
What if I spent a year of my life traveling the country, cooking shoulder-to-shoulder with the best chefs and home cooks all over, gleaning as much knowledge, experience, and inspiration as I could in the process? Why, such an adventure might be instructive, edifying, and empowering not only for me, but also for you, the reader. A project like that could make all of us better cooks.
You are now holding the result: this book. Here in these pages, I’ve attempted to distill the breathtaking amount of culinary wisdom that these giants in the kitchen have to share. Once you start reading these essays and cooking these recipes, you’ll throw out your old bag of tricks and start thinking about color and texture, where your ingredients come from, how best to combine them, and how, once they’re combined, to present everything in the most beautiful way possible. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The point is: the child of a noncooking, shoes-in-the-oven family went on an epic cooking odyssey and now gets to share this wealth of culinary knowledge with you. Come along with me, then, as we learn to cook like the chefs in this book do. Some of the recipes may be intimidating, but just remember where I started. If an amateur like me can make this extraordinary food, you can make it too!