We recently received a press release in the Gothamist feedbag announcing the arrival of “Top Chef: The Cookbook.” Being a major Top Chef junkie, we were pretty excited about this one. The official scoop is that the book, the "official companion cookbook" the #1 food show on cable will arrive in March and have: More than 100 Quick Fire Challenge and Elimination Round recipes from the first three seasons of the series; "In-depth discussions" with......

You will never find Chef Bobby Flay too far away from an ancho chili pepper. Back in 1991, he opened Mesa Grill in New York, his shrine to the Southwestern flavors for which he is now famous around the world. In 1992, Mesa Grill won New York Magazine's Best New Restaurant, and the following year, Flay was given the James Beard Rising Star Chef award. Since then, he has created a mini-empire of six restaurants,......

In case you haven't noticed, 'tis the season for giving and all that jazz. You've got a friend/relative/other loved one who can't get enough of the epicurean lifestyle, and you're looking for the perfect gift. Never fear -- 'tis also the season of gift guides, which will steer you to gifts that will guarantee a smile. First, our own five gifts for the foodie under $50, all available online, including a beautiful olive wood mortar......

Alice Waters is considered by many to be a revolutionary. She opened Chez Panisse in 1971 and began awakening America to the benefits of local, sustainable agriculture by changing her menu according to what was available seasonally. She has taken this charge beyond her restaurant through her books as well as through her Edible Schoolyard program, which enables public school children to explore the connection between what they eat and where it comes from through......

The folks over at the all delicious, all the time site Serious Eats rounded up and presented a bumper crop of recipes from the newly released Mark Bittman cookbook last week, the 996-page How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food. The latest in Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” series, this giant book is exactly what those omnibus, fried-shallot-and-butternut-squash glossy vegetarian porn books strategically posed on chain bookstore discount tables purport to......

We've all got our go-to recipe bibles. You know -- the book you go to when you're looking for basics, like how to hard-boil an egg; simple, traditional recipes, like beef stew, chicken fricasee, or corn muffins; or some yet untried way to zip up a tired ingredient. In Italy, it's The Silver Spoon, in America, it's the Joy of Cooking (or, one might argue, How to Cook Everything). In Spain, it's 1080 Recetas de......

At the end of a row of newspaper boxes lining a street in Corona Plaza is an orange number offering a free publication titled, "This Is What I Eat." The eight-page newspaper is also being given out at a nearby Associated Supermarket. The design screams supermarket circular, but "This Is What I Eat" is actually a public art project created by Stephanie Diamond. Diamond asked the residents of New York City's most diverse nabe about......

You may not yet have heard of Marco Pierre White, unless, of course you are one of the untold numbers of commis cooks and line jockeys in restaurants all over the world for the last twenty years for whom the iconoclast British chef changed the food game entirely. White's new memoir The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef (published in the U.K. last year as White Slave)......

Nach Waxman is wearing a baseball hat decorated with the diamond shaped Avery Island Tabasco logo as he takes Gothamist around the stacks at Kitchen Arts and Letters, his 23 year-old Upper East Side bookshop. He is talking about Rachael Ray. “It’s a funny story,” says Waxman, describing his first impressions of the current Triscuit box doyenne. He shakes his head and laughs. “Nobody here had heard of her. We didn’t carry her books.......

If you don't have kids, go round some up so that you can try out some of the creations in Super-Duper Cupcakes, by Elaine Cohen, owner of the Cupcake Caboose catering company. Cohen provides ideas for whimsical cupcake designs, rated from easy (one spoon) to more difficult (three spoons). She offers very basic recipes for vanilla and chocolate cupcakes and frostings, but even if you don't really cook, you can still join in on the......

As you might imagine, growing up surrounded by the best soul food in New York can be somewhat detrimental to the waistline. Lindsey Williams, grandson of the “queen of soul food,” Sylvia Woods, learned this firsthand. Williams struggled with weight issues his entire life, and he hit his self proclaimed “rock bottom” after watching his wife and his successful career in the music industry disappear. He was 400 pounds. After recognizing that he had a......

We've always been a big fan of vodka. For the sake of, um, journalism, we even tasted 10 different vodkas in one night, just to save you the trouble. But we've generally stuck to consuming our vodka from a glass of some sort. Not so John Rose, the author of The Vodka Cookbook. John, whose passion for vodka was ignited when he began traveling to Moscow for work (he now lives there). Simultaneously, he......

The Gourmet Cookbook: More Than 1000 Recipes by John Willoughby, Zanne Early Stewart, Ruth Reichl (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) Seeing as Gothamist is a Ruth Reichl fan, we figured we should check out the cookbook she recently co-edited for Gourmet magazine, especially after we heard that it contained recipes from the past 60 years of the magazine. It turns out that the cookbook is overwhelming in its comprehensiveness--in a good way. From quick-and-easy to slow-cooking and......

Food and Wine Annual Cookbook 2005: An Entire Year of Recipes by Dana Cowin & Kate Heddings (American Express, 2005). Gothamist likes coleslaw as much as the next person, but sometimes the familiar can be a bit too, well . . . familiar. Which is why we were interested to try a kaleslaw recipe we found in New York-based Food and Wine magazine's 2005 cookbook roundup. Yes, kale, the lesser-known but delicious dark green leafy......

The Healthy Hedonist: More Than 200 Delectable Flexitarian Recipes for Relaxed Daily Feasts by Myra Kornfeld (Simon and Schuster, 2005) With summer coming to an end but the warm weather still around (for now), Gothamist felt the need to not only eat ice cream, but to make ice cream. And while we have no childhood memories of hand cranking an old-time ice cream machine, we nevertheless were very excited to try out a Cuisinart electric......

It's All American Food: The Best Recipes for More Than 400 New American Classics by David Rosengarten (Little, Brown, 2003) OK, we admit it: Gothamist grew up on Bisquick pancakes. (And we liked 'em.) But childhood tastes (hopefully) change when one grows up, and for us, our taste in pancakes now leans heavily towards homemade in general, buttermilk in particular. And while you'll find buttermilk pancakes on many a New York restaurant brunch menu, they're......

The Gift of Southern Cooking: Recipes and Revelations from Two Great American Cooks by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock (Knopf, 2003) Gothamist is convinced that when it comes to birthday cake, taste trumps appearance. Sure, you want a cake that's attractive, but it doesn't need to be fancy. And with those candles blazing on top, who's cares if there's flowers or birthday wishes scrolled on top? So when we needed to make a birthday cake......

Tate's Bake Shop Cookbook: The Best Recipes from Southampton's Favorite Bakery for Home-Style Cookies, Cakes, Pies, Muffins, and Breads by Kathleen King (St. Martin's Press, 2005) As the heat wave has continued on with but a brief respite, Gothamist has maintained its no-cooking policy for the most part. But there is one exception: baking. Cookies and cakes can't be made without an oven, unfortunately, so this past weekend we cranked up the A/C to make......

The Babbo Cookbook by Mario Batali (Clarkson Potter, 2002) Still feeling the heat this week, Gothamist decided to only slightly deviate from our no-cooking policy by making Mario Batali's tomato and sheep's milk bruschetta. With tomatoes at their peak right now (and lots of different varieties available at the greenmarkets), we're always looking for a new way way to eat (uncooked) tomatoes. After many tomato salads and lots of pico de gallo salsa, Italian bruschetta......

Zarela's Veracruz: Mexico's Simplest CuisineZarela's Veracruz: Mexico's Simplest Cuisine (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) With a heat wave like this, Gothamist could not bring ourselves to cook by any book this week--not in any way that involved a stove or oven. Instead, we decided to make an uncooked salsa. And while we've spent all summer long making pico de gallo salsa with the local tomatoes we can't get enough of, this week we wanted to do something......

Young and Hungry: More than 100 Recipes for Cooking Fresh and Affordable Food for Everyone by Dave Lieberman (Hyperion, 2005) While we've always been fond of blueberries, for some reason this summer in particular has brought out Gothamist's blueberry bent. They're in season right now and all the farmers' markets have plenty of them (but not for much longer). We've been eating them straight up, as an accompaniment to tres leches cake, even with homemade......

How To Cook Everything: Bittman Takes On America's Chefs by Mark Bittman (Wiley, 2005) Last week, we began our first ever two-part "Gothamist Cooks" column so that we could do justice to Mark Bittman's new book in which he, Minimalist-style, challenges various chefs. Gothamist wanted to test his claim that his homecooking style could go the distance versus full-on chef cuisine (with its major time investment of chopping and prepping inherent). To be fair to......

How To Cook Everything: Bittman Takes On America's Chefs by Mark Bittman (Wiley, 2005) Gothamist's been a fan of Mark Bittman--a.k.a. New York Times' "The Minimalist"--for years now, and with good reason. His minimalist approach to cooking is geared towards home cooks who don't want to spend all day cooking but still expect gourmet results for their efforts. With no formal training of his own, Bittman has no trouble thinking like a home cook, because......

Cupcakes! by Elinor Klivans (Chronicle Books, 2005) Just when you thought Gothamist couldn't find a new twist on cupcakes, we found this new cookbook devoted just to cupcakes that features an old New York classic, the "chocolate-covered hi-hat" cupcake. According to author Elinor Klivans, these cupcakes are an old-fashioned bakery specialty particular to New York City. Personally, we've never seen them, so we suspect that they're a thing of the past. All the more......

Bouchon by Thomas Keller (Artisan, 2004) While Thomas Keller's Per Serestaurant won this year's James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant, we know that most New Yorkers will never set foot there. The prices are rather steep, making it a once-in-a-lifetime sort of experience for those who do go at all. But Keller does have two cookbooks that give insight into his cooking technique, style, and inspiration. Gothamist decided to try our hand at one......

The Angelica Home Kitchen: Recipes and Rabble Rousings from an Organic Vegan Restaurant by Leslie McEachern (Ten Speed Press, 2003) While Gothamist is a huge fan of traditional, Southern-style cornbread (and spicy variants thereof), we've always enjoyed Angelica Kitchen's "Angelica cornbread." Described as a "lumpy, moist, chewy, fiber-filled whole-grain loaf" in their cookbook, this cornbread only fits the definition of the term in the loosest sense. But that's okay, because Gothamist enjoys partaking in the......

The Glorious Foods of Greece: Traditional Foods from the Islands, Cities, and Villages by Diane Kochilas (Morrow, 2001). Gothamist loves Greek food. And we love that more and more good Greek food, from fancy to casual, is available in the city. But we've noticed that certain dishes turn up again and again at various Greek restaurants, while others are nowhere to be found. While phyllo-wrapped spinach pies and cheese pies are common fare in most......

Second Helpings from Union Square Cafe: 160 New Recipes from New York's Favorite Restaurant, by Danny Meyer and Michael Romano (HarperCollins, 2001) Despite the unseasonably cold weather this far into spring, Gothamist knows that summer's just around the corner, and with summer comes summer wardrobes. Ack. So after indulging you with the likes of cheesecake and frozen hot chocolate, we've decided to switch gears this week and go for some lighter fare. But we don't......

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl (Penguin, 2005) "[W]hat is the taste of New York? To much of the world, it's cheesecake." When Gothamist read that line on page 20 of Ruth Reichl's newest memoir, Garlic and Sapphires, we knew that this was the recipe we wanted to prepare for this week's column. As tempting as some of her other recipes sounded--Roasted Rhubarb, Last-Minute Chocolate Cake, Risotto......

Sweet Serendipity: Delightful Desserts and Devilish Dish by Stephen Bruce (Universe, 2004) This winter, Gothamist developed a serious hot chocolate habit. All that snow had us pining for steamy, melted dark chocolate--the stronger, the better. But now that (sort of) warm weather is here, and truly hot temperatures are just around the corner, we started searching for a new way to get our chocolate fix. When visiting friends recently tried to go for dessert at......