In Adam Roberts’s debut novel, Food Person, a young woman is abruptly fired from her job at a food magazine and ends up ghostwriting a cookbook for a problematic TV actress — “hungover, flaky, shallow, and — worst of all — indifferent to food,” as the book jacket puts it. Roberts, a longtime food-media figure who blogs as the Amateur Gourmet, took the idea straight from his life, though his version was much less dramatic. “My celebrity was really nice and great,” he says. “I had the idea, What if they hadn’t been?” The process of ghostwriting, he says, was almost akin to therapy: “I was helping them coax out the stories surrounding their recipes. It was like, ‘What does corn mean to you?’” This week, Roberts ate duck-fat potatoes at his favorite neighborhood spot in Brooklyn, stopped by a Champagne-heavy baby shower, and worked through a glut of rhubarb in his fridge.

The day always starts with my husband, Craig, making a cappuccino for himself. I wait until after we’ve walked our dog, Winston, to make my own coffee. It’s an overcast day, in the 50s, and even though I’ve switched to iced Americanos as my springtime morning drink, I feel like it’s not iced-coffee weather. Remember the website that used to tell you if it was iced-coffee weather or hot-coffee weather in New York? I decide to have an oat-milk cappuccino because that sounds cozy, and I pair it with a banana for health.

Our writer friend Jonathan Parks-Ramage has been staying with us for the Lucille Lortel Awards. He sets off for the airport, and then I get started on a dessert for that night’s dinner party: Our friends Luciano and Kyle are coming over, and I have a glut of rhubarb and raspberries from a raspberry-rhubarb pie that I made for Jonathan’s arrival.

After using Eat Your Books, a website that lets you search through your cookbook collection by ingredient, I decide to make Yotam Ottolenghi’s strawberry-rhubarb crumble cake from his dessert book Sweet, subbing raspberries for strawberries. You make a cake base with powdered sugar and softened butter (almost like icing?), add eggs and flour, then — after scraping it into a springform pan — you pile on the berries and finally a crumble. The weird part is that you bake it in a 400-degree oven instead of the typical 350-degree oven you’d use for cake. It’s supposed to be in there for 70 minutes, but I grow suspicious after an hour and take it out; turns out not only is it done, if it had gone on much longer, the bottom would’ve been charred black.

When I look at the clock, it’s after 1 p.m., and Craig is asking about lunch (we both work from home). I grab some lettuce that came with our Farm to People CSA box and whip up a down-and-dirty Caesar salad by whisking together Dijon, grated garlic, anchovy paste, lemon juice, lots of Parmesan, and olive oil. I tear up leftover sourdough and toast it in olive oil in a skillet with some salt and then toss everything together. I accidentally knock over a jar of sun-dried tomatoes in the refrigerator, and when it doesn’t shatter, I think why not? and put them in the salad. They’re a surprisingly good addition.

In the afternoon, I make my typical beverage: an iced cortado with a little maple syrup. I bought Craig a Breville Barista Pro as a gift in 2022. It’s truly one of the most money-saving devices we own: Each coffee, with tax and tip, would cost $7 at a coffee shop. Multiply that by four — we each have two coffee drinks a day — and it’s like having your own personal ATM spitting out free cash. I finish writing an essay about the best food scenes in literature for LitHub and summon Craig, who is a film director, to the kitchen to put his skills to the test. My publisher wants me to make an Instagram Reel, and I decide to demo bananas Foster, a recipe that plays a pivotal role in my novel.

Craig and I have been together for almost 20 years. We went on our first date in 2006 at Lucien when we were both grad students at NYU: He was in the film school; I was in the dramatic-writing program. As he likes to say, the secret to our relationship is “we drive each other the appropriate amount of crazy.” To prove his point, he keeps making me restart several of the cooking steps, including lighting the bananas on fire. But eventually we get the footage we need and I send him back upstairs to his lair.

When Luciano and Kyle show up for dinner, Craig makes a Last Word cocktail — gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lime juice — and we pair it with cheeses from Léa Fromages, which recently opened on Smith Street. We catch up in the living room and then migrate to the table, where I serve up broiled chicken thighs, Carolina rice, roasted asparagus, and — the key ingredient — a ramp pesto that I make by ferociously chopping ramps with toasted walnuts until it’s a coarse mixture, stirring it together with lemon juice, Parmesan, salt, and olive oil. We lived in L.A. for 12 years, and I really missed ramps when we were there.

I serve the raspberry-rhubarb crumble cake for dessert and it earns raves, but at that point we’re two bottles of wine in. We wind up at the piano; I play Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” and Luciano croons at the top of his lungs. Thankfully, we live in a carriage house, so we have no neighbors to annoy. When we were in the West Village, I used to belt Evita while playing my electric keyboard, and one day a sassy neighbor was coming home and asked Craig whether he was the one who plays the piano. “No,” said Craig cheerfully. “That’s my partner.” “Well,” said the neighbor before closing his door, “it’s a nightmare.”

We’re really on the cusp today, but I decide it’s iced-coffee weather and make an iced Americano. I pair it with a slice of the blackened Ottolenghi cake. Having crumb cake for breakfast reminds me of my childhood in Oceanside, on Long Island, where my dad always had an array of Entenmann’s items on offer: chocolate doughnuts (my brother’s favorite), lemon-coconut cake (more of a nighttime affair), and the famous Entenmann’s crumb coffee cake that comes in that signature white box with the little plastic window in it.

As if this isn’t Jewish enough, when lunch rolls around, I head to Smith Street Bagels for an extra-toasted everything bagel with whitefish salad, tomato, and red onion. I ask for it extra toasted because otherwise they speed it through the toaster, and I like a little color on it unless the bagel is still warm from the oven. As for the toppings, I have strong beliefs about bagels: If it doesn’t give you terrible breath, you’re doing it wrong. My grandmother ate raw red onions with everything and then would ask why people thought her breath stank. Have some gum, Grandma.

I eat the bagel in my kitchen while listening to Barbra Streisand’s memoir. I’ve been making my way through it for weeks and weeks, and when Alexa starts playing it, she says: “You have one day and 14 hours left in this book.” I swear this book is longer than the Old Testament … and more self-important!

In the afternoon, I make another iced cortado and set about writing personal notes to influencers who’ll be receiving my novel in the mail. My handwriting is a little shaky, so it takes a lot of time to make them legible. I have another nibble of the extra-toasted Ottolenghi raspberry-rhubarb cake.

At 4 o’clock, I hop on the F train to Delancey and trek down to Ha’s Snack Bar, where I’m first in line to get a table without a reservation.

I’m there to meet a food-critic friend, and we’re seated at two barstools near the window. I hate stools. I’d rather eat mediocre food on a nice chair than really good food on a stool. I’ve often said that the thing I love most about dining is sitting, not eating.

That said, the food at Ha’s is so good. We start with a salad of wild herbs, spring greens, and shallot — it’s peppery and punchy and full of surprise flavor. The radishes with caramelized fish sauce and dried shrimp hit a similar note: a bunch of pretty radishes and then a bowl of pure umami.

The deeper we travel into the menu, the more exciting the food gets. The snails with tamarind butter? Outstanding, especially when you sop everything up with the crackly baguette. And the pâté chaud is like if a cream puff and a pork bun had a baby in France and decided to raise it in a commune of leeks and butter. The lamb shoulder and asparagus come with such an electric-green, spicy sauce it may as well be plugged into the wall. And the tapioca-strawberry-pistachio parfait is the perfect soothing end to the meal.

I recommend a trip to the restroom, not because it’s a notable restroom but because it offers you a chance to glimpse the impossibly small kitchen. People on Park Avenue with eight burners and endless counter space could only dream of making food this good, and the Ha’s chefs do it on just a few portable burners. Totally insane.

It’s another iced-Americano day, and I pair it with a banana.

I spend the morning making a spring panzanella with tuna for an ad campaign I’m filming, and the campaign is so effective I decide to make tuna for lunch.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat their tuna. Abstemious with the mayo? Not very fun at parties. Too many capers? Sexual deviant.Me: I put in a big dollop of mayo, Dijon mustard, lemon zest, lemon juice, chopped red onion (hi, Grandma), chopped celery, chopped gherkins, capers, and enough dill to make Alison Roman blush. I serve it on toasted multigrain bread and leave enough for Craig, who’s off at a coffee shop working on some writing.

In the afternoon it’s an iced cortado and more note writing. For dinner, we head to my favorite restaurant in New York: Bar Bête.

As far as I’m concerned, Bar Bête is the platonic ideal of a restaurant. Our friend Albertina turned us on to it when we were moving back from L.A., and she was so right. There’s tons of natural light. Everyone is friendly and knows our names. The food is absolutely sublime. And they have chairs.

We start with a scallop crudo with pickled rhubarb, citrus, and a yuzu koshō vinaigrette that swirls with the rhubarb liquid on the plate, making for a trippy, tie-dyed, pink-orange effect. Meredith Dairy feta with oro blanco and turmeric vinaigrette is served with giant pieces of toasted bread and may be the best bite I’ve had all week: creamy, tangy, bright, citrusy — out of this world.

Tuna toast with Calabrian chile is a little spicier than normal, but the salad with pickled mushrooms, crispy shallots, and mustard vinaigrette is as good as ever. There’s something about the mustard in the vinaigrette that’s surprisingly mustardy: Like, I swear they put wasabi or mustard powder in it, but I asked a server once and they said it was just extra-strong Dijon.

We round things out with the duck-fat potatoes, which are marvels: Each bite offers maximum crunch, the perfect amount of salt, and a fluffy interior. I can’t stop eating them.

At 6:29 we realize we have to scurry uptown to see a show, and Craig has the brilliant idea to ask for Bar Bête’s yellow cake with dark-chocolate frosting and sea salt to go. We pay the bill, rush the cake home, and head uptown to City Center to see We Had a World.

Back home, we devour the cake and throw some crumbs to Winston, who immediately starts rolling all over the carpet and wagging his tail. It is that good.

There’s a nip in the air, so this morning it’s a hot Americano and a banana. I attempt to do the Friday New York Times crossword puzzle but struggle. After all the rich food this week, I decide to conjure a French carrot salad — carrot rapées — for lunch by peeling carrots and pushing them through the grating disc of my food processor. Once they’re shredded, I add olive oil, white-wine vinegar, citrus segments from some oranges I have laying around, toasted walnuts, dried cherries, and chopped cilantro. It’s bright and refreshing and, once again, I pair it with Barbra Streisand’s memoir.

Today, Babs is talking about going to Marseilles and how she wants to try bouillabaisse but the hotel restaurant doesn’t have it. So she goes out with Elliott Gould and their friends for a big dinner and ice cream, and when she comes back to the hotel, the maître d’ says he has a wonderful surprise: The chef made her bouillabaisse! She’s full, but she doesn’t want to be rude, so she eats it and spends the rest of the night throwing up. What a shanda.

Tonight, my cookbook-author friend Lukas Volger and his husband, Vincent, are coming over for dinner, and I want to impress. I still have rhubarb in my fridge — it seems to be reproducing when I go to sleep — so I decide to make a rhubarb tarte tatin from Nicole Rucker’s cookbook Dappled.

Making a rhubarb tarte tatin sounds complex, but it’s not so bad. You essentially make pie dough, refrigerate it, melt brown sugar and butter with some vanilla paste in a cast-iron skillet, add rhubarb in an attractive pattern, roll out the pie dough, place it on top, and bake in a 400-degree oven. When it comes out 25 minutes later, it’s bubbling all around the edges and the dough is nice and brown. I wait 20 minutes to flip it out onto my cake stand, and when I do, it’s glistening and red and looks too pretty to eat.

For the entrée, I embark on a recipe that I’ve long had filed away and feels right for this moment: Amanda Hesser’s white Bolognese from Cooking for Mr. Latte. Tomatoes before rhubarb would seem strange (don’t ask me why), so the fact that this is just onions, carrots, celery, beef, and sausage is a winning proposition.

The key to the recipe is that after sautéing the vegetables in olive oil, you add all of the meat and brown it really well. A lot of liquid comes out at first, and you have to be patient while it evaporates. I listen to show tunes when I cook (shocker!), so I put on Dreamgirls, and by the time Effie is singing “And I Am Telling You,” the meat starts to caramelize. I deglaze with white wine and add some beef bouillon and porcinis before finishing it off with a bit of cream. This sauce has incredible flavor, though in the looks department, it’s giving sickly sloppy joe.

For a salad, I toss radicchio with shaved fennel and a vinaigrette I make with Dijon, tangerine juice, lemon juice, Parmesan, and olive oil.

When Lukas and Vincent arrive, Winston greets them at the door, and Craig, our resident mixologist, makes Paper Planes with bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, and lemon juice. It’s a perfect brown-red cocktail on a chilly, rainy night.

When it’s time to serve dinner, I boil rigatoni and finish it in the pan with the sauce, sprinkling everything with Parmesan and parsley. It’s a big hit.

For dessert, I start whipping cream in my mixer, but there’s not enough liquid for the whisk attachment, so I take it out and start doing it by hand. It’s taking me a long time, so Lukas takes over. “The secret is pretending there’s a newspaper under your arm,” he says. The cream is totally whipped in 13.8 seconds.

Iced-Americano weather and a little slice of rhubarb tarte tatin for breakfast.

I’m feeling a bit spent from all the cooking and cleaning, so instead of cooking breakfast, we order sandwiches from Ciao, Gloria. I get the Fo’Cotto, which is Italian ham, red-onion jam, Fontina cheese, and whole-grain mayo on focaccia, and Craig asks for the PEC: crispy prosciutto, frittata, provolone, greens, and Calabrese aioli on brioche. Only I accidentally order him the BEC: bacon, frittata, cheddar, and Calabrese aioli on brioche, and we end up switching sandwiches.

I make an iced cortado, and since it’s Saturday, I read a little of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto and then we go shopping for baby clothes and a card to bring to our friends’ Jason and Jeremy’s baby shower in Crown Heights.

We Uber over, and the weather is gorgeous. Like a good Jewish host, Jeremy has way too much food and drink. “You guys have to drink some of the Champagne,” pleads Jason. “Jeremy ordered two cases!”

Indeed, there’s an ice bucket filled with Moët & Chandon, and we pour ourselves hefty glasses. On a table are giant platters of food from Ayat — hummus, baba ghannouj, muhamarra, chicken kebabs — and it being 4 o’clock, Craig and I enter into one of the most famous debates in our relationship. Craig believes that when we go to a party and there’s food, that should be our meal. Since it’s close to dinner, he wants this to be our dinner. For me, party food never feels like a meal because it’s usually snack-y and you eat it while standing up. Have I already mentioned that I prefer sitting to eating?

But the party is so fun, we run into some friends, and the Champagne is so plentiful that by 6:30, I make myself a big plate of hummus, chicken, muhamarra, and salad, and do you know what? It’s so good I forget that I’m not sitting down.

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