I have hated cooking ever since my days as an undergraduate at UGA, working as a prep cook at a Mexican restaurant that has long since folded. I don't have the patience for it or the time investment. On nights I have to make dinner for my family, welcome to Chez Microwave, home of the eight-minute Salisbury steak. But - and this is where it gets weird - I love watching cooking shows. I've followed all three seasons of "Top Chef" and have stayed up until four in the morning to watch "Iron Chef" reruns (the Japanese original, not the weak American version) on the Food Network. Alton Brown tweaks my geek nerve and Anthony Bourdain commands my Monday nights. I have become, to my utter surprise and dismay, a foodie.

And now I find myself wanting to cook. I need, however, a place to start. Enter Adam D. Roberts, founder of the remarkable website www.amateurgourmet.com and the author of a new food memoir called, appropriately enough, The Amateur Gourmet: How to Shop, Chop, and Table-hop Like a Pro (Almost) (Bantam, 2007). It's not a cookbook, though there are recipes here and there, mostly cobbled from other people's cookbooks, but rather it's a warm and funny introduction to the pleasures of cuisine. It's a love letter to good food, and a welcome guide for the uninitiated through the often baffling process of shopping for, prepping, and pulling together a meal one can eat with actual silverware.

Roberts tells of having been, like me, hopelessly clueless about the kitchen. He was a restaurant kid, his mother largely unwilling to cook and his father happy to oblige her. While struggling through the grind and pressure of Emory University Law School, he needed something to ease his mind and speak to his soul, and he found it in the bright colors and boundless energy of the Food Network. After hours of absorbing cooking tips and eye candy, he bought a couple of cookbooks and supplies and started simple, with a spaghetti sauce recipe from Mario Battali. It didn't turn out exactly as planned, but the hook was in. He had discovered the zen of food.

The book, served up in short, easily digested chapters, follows Roberts as he explores the various aspects of food fandom. It is important that Roberts is not a chef and doesn't aspire to be one. Nor does he present himself as some sort of culinary know-it-all. Despite the award-winning success of his website and restaurant reviews, he depicts himself as a novice here, a friend giving advice to the reader who is presumably as lost as he was. To this end, he seeks out help. From Eric "Bubba" Gabrynowycz, the sous-chef at New York's famous Union Square Café, he learns how to dice an onion and the importance of a good knife and of developing the skills to use it comfortably. New York Times food critic Amanda Hesser sits down with Roberts and answers a barrage of questions about how to shop at a farmer's market - tip number one: never bring a list. And in an amazing stroke of ballsiness, he goes to lunch with Ruth Reichl, editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine and perhaps the most influential food writer alive, and braves some serious foolishness in learning how to eat in a restaurant without a drive-through.

Along the way, Roberts talks us through his experiences with cooking for himself, resisting the temptation of the microwave and emerging the better for it, talks a friend through cooking for a date, and faces off against his mother, Queen of Reservations, for permission to cook for the family. Each situation has its own difficulties and pitfalls, but Roberts makes the point again and again that, whether one prepares dinner for one or a feast for 10, cooking is an act of love and, approached as such, can be the truest and deepest expression one can give. As otherwise functional adults, we should be capable of cooking as well as we like to eat. And if we love someone - girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, parents, siblings, children, ourselves - we should be able to show it through that most basic of human needs, food.

That, I have come to realize, is why I have avoided the kitchen for so long. My previous food experiences have all been work, toil and trouble and occasional terror, never with the zen purity of bringing together fresh ingredients or the adventurism of a bold new experiment, the sensory hedonism of tastes and scents and textures or the simple joys of pleasing others with the product of my loving labors. Adam Roberts knows what I mean, and his book is a gentle reminder of the door to eating well - and thus living well - that stands always within reach and always open.

John G. Nettles