Famous wardrobe malfunction gave him great exposure

This week, Adam Roberts, 28, the self-styled kitchen novice behind the popular blog amateurgourmet.com, is food website hopping on a virtual book tour to promote "The Amateur Gourmet: How to Shop, Chop, and Table-Hop Like A Pro (Almost)." That means that the author, skinny and nebbishy, with a nasally musical theater voice that would fit perfectly on NPR's "This American Life," has become a sort of Rachael Ray for young foodie urbanites. He's enthusiastically blundering his way through everything from caramel corn to pita bread.

Without ever having attended culinary school, or trained in a restaurant kitchen, Roberts began blogging in January 2004. At the time, he was a law student at Emory University in Atlanta, had picked up a pan for the first time, and for himself, and maybe friends and family, started a kitchen blog. "I was tired of Uncle Ben's frozen rice bowls and California Pizza Kitchen pies," he says. He ate out all over town for inspiration and attempted recipes from cookbooks, recording his experiments with goofy anecdotes and blurry point-and-shoot digital photographs.

A month later, after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at Super Bowl XXVIII, Roberts baked "Janet Jackson breast cupcakes" and posted photos and recipes on the blog. Other popular sites - collegehumor.com and instapundit.com among them - linked to his post and CNN came to his apartment to film a segment. A couple of hundred thousand people visited his website and Roberts and his cappuccino cupcakes became an overnight sensation.

After law school, he moved to New York for a writing program at New York University. He kept working on his blog and quickly picked up a book contract with Bantam Dell. Now, the book is out, the blog is busier than ever, and Roberts is still cooking away in Brooklyn's Park Slope, where he lives and works with his partner and video collaborator, Craig Johnson, and their cat, Lolita.

Roberts posts about once a day. You'll find stories and recipes, plenty of restaurant reviews, some how-to's and essays, a few nerdy songs, and a handful of short films. Roberts has won awards for his comic-book-style photo and speech bubble posts. Recently he documented a $320-a-person white truffle tasting at the now closed Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, and dinner with his parents at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown, N.Y., his "new favorite restaurant" (welcome to the club).

Since moving to New York Roberts has made a living as a food and blog writer, and sells advertising space on his homepage. Where other bloggers have some childhood connection to home cooking, Roberts, who grew up in New York and Boca Raton, Fla., went to restaurants almost every night. He says that his parents are likely to have just egg beaters and diet bars in the fridge and that they judge a restaurant by the likelihood of celebrity sightings (so far Woody Allen, Richard Simmons, Sarah Jessica Parker, Mike Tyson, Howard Stern, and about three dozen others have been photographed with them or their kids).

Together, the website - whose recipes come from books (a favorite is Greek salad from "The Best Traditional Recipes of Greek Cooking" by Maria Mavromataki) - and new book have turned into a diary of Roberts's culinary education, from the grocery store to farmers' markets to the kitchen. "It's not just a collection of blog posts," says Roberts. He goes to lunch with Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl to learn to dine like a professional, to a market with New York Times writer Amanda Hesser to talk about food shopping.

In almost four years of blogging, Roberts has figured out how to pick a peach and peel an artichoke, but says he will always be an amateur. "There is so much to learn and I never want to be a know-it-all."