Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater

A memoir about the joys of food and parenting and the wild mélange of the two
Matthew Amster-Burton was a restaurant critic and food writer long before he and his wife, Laurie, had Iris. Now he’s a full-time, stay-at-home Dad and his experience with food has changed . . . a little. He's come to realize that kids don’t need puree in a jar or special menus at restaurants, and that raising an adventurous eater is about exposure, invention, and patience. He writes of the highs and lows of teaching your child about food--the high of rediscovering how something tastes for the first time through a child’s unedited reaction, and the low of thinking you have a precocious vegetable fiend on your hands only to discover that a child’s preferences change from day to day (and may take years to include vegetables again). Sharing in his culinary capers is little Iris, a budding gourmand and a zippy critic herself who makes huge sandwiches, gobbles up hot chilis, and even helps around the kitchen sometimes. Hungry Monkey takes food enthusiasts on a new adventure in eating and offers dozens of delicious recipes that "little fingers" can help to make.

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Amster-Burton, Matthew

Cooking Education & Reference

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Harvest

Everyone knows how to live the good life in Paris, Provence, or Tuscany. Now, Matthew Amster-Burton makes you fall in love with Tokyo. Experience this exciting and misunderstood city through the eyes of three Americans vacationing in a tiny Tokyo apartment. Follow 8-year-old Iris on a solo errand to the world's greatest supermarket, picnic on the bullet train, and eat a staggering array of great, inexpensive foods, from eel to udon. A humorous travel memoir in the tradition of Peter Mayle and Bill Bryson, Pretty Good Number One is the next best thing to a ticket to Tokyo. 
Includes a new afterword by the author featuring Christmas in Tokyo, fried UFOs, a robotic sushi restaurant, and more. "The layers of the city, its extraordinary food pleasures, its quirkinesses, emerge as the author and his family spend an intense month living in Tokyo and exploring widely...Warning: this book will make you hungry. You'll yearn, as I do, to catch the next plane to Tokyo, so you can get eating."
—Naomi Duguid, writer and traveler; her most recent book is BURMA: Rivers of Flavor (Artisan 2012) "This is the book I've been hoping Matthew would write: smart, opinionated, and wickedly funny, crammed with in-the-know tips and observations about visiting Tokyo. From the intricacies of garbage sorting to the chirpy jingle for the local supermarket, the pleasures of pan-fried soup dumplings to the pain of junsai, I laughed, cringed, and got so hungry that I had to eat three bowls of cereal to make it to the end. I love this book." —Molly Wizenberg, author of A Homemade Life and creator of Orangette

Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

Travel

Asia

Viaduct Music

Katy has a rack full of Nirvana and Soundgarden CDs. She's seen Pearl Jam in concert, twice. She never imagined she would be the one behind the microphone. From the book: Years later, Katy could remember not only which song was playing--Screaming Trees, "Bed of Roses"--but the exact moment in the song where the needle came off the record. The house lights clicked off, and a row of stage lights came on, blinding like L.A. daylight. No wonder so many people wore sunglasses on stage. She blinked her eyes and tried to bring any object into focus, but Megan was hissing, "Now!" Katy's lips brushed against the head of the mic. "We're The Laundry Room, from Los Angeles, California." Our Secret Better Lives is a novel for anyone who's ever fallen in love with a song. "Like a really good pop song--short, sweet, and...immersive." -Robin McWaters "Pitch-perfect emotional resonance should make this story of a girl, independence, musical passion, friendship, and the special interdependence of being in a band a definite indie hit." -Tegan Tigani, children's and YA book buyer, Queen Anne Book Company "Matthew Amster-Burton writes things that settle comfortably down in your head and have always been there. This is no exception." -Justin de Vesine, Goodreads

Our Secret Better Lives

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Nakano Books

Thirty-six of the most interesting writers in the Pacific Northwest came together for a week-long marathon of writing live on stage. The result? Hotel Angeline, a truly inventive novel that surprises at every turn of the page. Something is amiss at the Hotel Angeline, a rickety former mortuary perched atop Capitol Hill in rain-soaked Seattle. Fourteen-year-old Alexis Austin is fixing the plumbing, the tea, and all the problems of the world, it seems, in her landlady mother’s absence.The quirky tenants—a hilarious mix of misfits and rabble-rousers from days gone by—rely on Alexis all the more when they discover a plot to sell the Hotel. Can Alexis save their home? Find her real father? Deal with her surrogate dad’s dicey past? Find true love? Perhaps only their feisty pet crow, Habib, truly knows. Provoking interesting questions about the creative process, this novel is by turns funny, scary, witty, suspenseful, beautiful, thrilling, and unexpected.

Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices

Welch, Craig

WIGGS, SUSAN

Bauermeister, Erica

Alcalá, Kathleen

Emerson, Kevin

Kallos, Stephanie

Dugoni, Robert

QUINN, JULIA

Shortridge, Jennie

Ford, Clyde W.

Headley, Maria Dahvana

Stein, Garth

Caletti, Deb

Ford, Jamie

McCue, Frances

SUNDARESAN, INDU

Cassella, Carol

Rawles, Nancy

O'Brien, Kevin

Dietrich, William

Boling, Dave

Stump, Greg

Guterson, Mary

Beaudoin, Sean

Middleton, Jarret

Finneyfrock, Karen

Mountford, Peter

Levine, Stacey

Skoog, Ed

Bakke, Kit

Lasky, David

Hein, Teri

Selfors,Suzanne

George,Elizabeth

Larson, Erik.

Literary

Open Road Media

Everyone knows how to live the good life in Paris, Provence, or Tuscany. Now, Matthew Amster-Burton makes you fall in love with Tokyo. Experience this exciting and misunderstood city through the eyes of three Americans living in a tiny Tokyo apartment. Follow 8-year-old Iris on a solo errand to the world’s greatest supermarket, picnic on the bullet train, and eat a staggering array of great, inexpensive foods, from eel to udon. A humorous travel memoir in the tradition of Peter Mayle and Bill Bryson, Pretty Good Number One is the next best thing to a ticket to Tokyo. “The layers of the city, its extraordinary food pleasures, its quirkinesses, emerge as the author and his family spend an intense month living in Tokyo and exploring widely…Warning: this book will make you hungry. You’ll yearn, as I do, to catch the next plane to Tokyo, so you can get eating.” —Naomi Duguid, writer and traveler; her most recent book is BURMA: Rivers of Flavor (Artisan 2012) “This is the book I've been hoping Matthew would write: smart, opinionated, and wickedly funny, crammed with in-the-know tips and observations about visiting Tokyo. From the intricacies of garbage sorting to the chirpy jingle for the local supermarket, the pleasures of pan-fried soup dumplings to the pain of junsai, I laughed, cringed, and got so hungry that I had to eat three bowls of cereal to make it to the end. I love this book.” —Molly Wizenberg, author of A Homemade Life and blogger, Orangette

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Includes a new afterword by the author featuring Christmas in Tokyo, fried UFOs, a robotic sushi restaurant, and more. Everyone knows how to live the good life in Paris, Provence, or Tuscany. Now, Matthew Amster-Burton makes you fall in love with Tokyo. Experience this exciting and misunderstood city through the eyes of three Americans living in a tiny Tokyo apartment. Follow 8-year-old Iris on a solo errand to the world's greatest supermarket, picnic on the bullet train, and eat a staggering array of great, inexpensive foods, from eel to udon. A humorous travel memoir in the tradition of Peter Mayle and Bill Bryson, Pretty Good Number One is the next best thing to a ticket to Tokyo. "The layers of the city, its extraordinary food pleasures, its quirkinesses, emerge as the author and his family spend an intense month living in Tokyo and exploring widely...Warning: this book will make you hungry. You'll yearn, as I do, to catch the next plane to Tokyo, so you can get eating." --Naomi Duguid, writer and traveler; her most recent book is BURMA: Rivers of Flavor (Artisan 2012) "This is the book I've been hoping Matthew would write: smart, opinionated, and wickedly funny, crammed with in-the-know tips and observations about visiting Tokyo. From the intricacies of garbage sorting to the chirpy jingle for the local supermarket, the pleasures of pan-fried soup dumplings to the pain of junsai, I laughed, cringed, and got so hungry that I had to eat three bowls of cereal to make it to the end. I love this book." --Molly Wizenberg, author of A Homemade Life and creator of Orangette

Createspace Independent Pub

A bite-sized (100+ page) Tokyo food adventure, perfect for your carry-on luggage. One November, two friends left their families at home and set out on an epic food crawl that found them ogling robots, eating just-dispatched eel, drinking whisky chilled with hand-carved ice balls, consuming fish sperm on purpose, and getting kicked out of public baths. An all-new illustrated book from Seattle food writers Matthew Amster-Burton (Pretty Good Number One) and Becky Selengut (Good Fish, Shroom), with manga-inspired illustrations by Denise Sakaki.

Not One Shrine: Two Food Writers Devour Tokyo

Selengut, Becky

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Books by Amster-Burton, Matthew