About Amanda

Amanda grew up in a family where everyone, including her father, cooked. In college, she worked at a bakery on Saturday nights and drove a truck around Boston at dawn, delivering the bread. She later worked in bakeries and restaurants in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France. After writing her first book, The Cook and the Gardener, Amanda was hired by the New York Times as a food reporter.

In 11 years, she wrote more than 800 stories for the Times, published another book, Cooking for Mr. Latte, based on a column she wrote about her courtship with her husband, and was deemed the "evil foodie darklord" by Gawker (a title she humbly cherishes). Her third book, Eat, Memory, was published in 2008, and the New York Times cookbook she's been working on for 5 years will be out in 2010. She plays herself in the much anticipated "Julie & Julia." Amanda now lives with Mr. Latte in Brooklyn with their twin son and daughter, who by age 2 had eaten both pigeon and uni, whether they liked it or not.

A dedicated multi-tasker, Amanda cooks and eats both seasonally and locally as much as possible. She would rather eat nothing than scarf down something on the run. She loves her label-maker, Balthazar's cinnamon bun and her double-handed kitchen mitt (a gift from Merrill!).

Amanda also enjoys risking life and limb by changing the position of her impossibly cumbersome oven rack once the oven is already hot. Among her cooking pet peeves are chopping parsley (hate! hate!), peeling tomatoes and recipes that lead to a sinkful of pots and pans.