Harwood graduate and Moretown native Amos Horn is The Valley Reporter’s new food columnist.
His column will be called Amos Bakes and Other Things, in an homage to David Cohen whose long-time column David Doesn’t Bake is now appearing only once a month in The Valley Reporter.
Horn graduated from Harwood in 2011 and attended the University of Oregon, Eugene, where he majored in journalism and completed a certificate program in outdoor leadership. He returned to Vermont in 2015 and in 2018 moved to California where he had a job just north of San Diego.
“That was a huge culture shock, after Vermont. I lasted a year there and moved back to Vermont in August 2019,” he said. He now works for Pale Morning Media.
Horn knows Cohen and his family and worked for Cohen and his wife Robin Cohen one summer at Baked Beads at their Waitsfield business.
“We’re good friends,” he said.
Horn has been cooking in some form or another for his entire life, he said. He has a large extended family on his mother’s side and grew up with large gatherings that centered around food. Unlike Cohen, he has a distinct interest in baking and grew up watching his family bake until he was old enough to experiment himself.
“I’m the chief chef in the house. I cook pretty much everything and mostly vegetarian because my partner is a vegetarian. I do treat myself to a nice cut of meat every now and then,” he said.
“Dinner is what I spend the most time on and I bake a lot of bread. I try to be as seasonal as possible and take advantage of the bounty that Vermont offers,” he said.
“Being in Vermont and the Mad River Valley is amazing. We get so much good food and produce. When I was in Oregon and California, that kind of community around food wasn’t there. You weren’t really ever talking to the farmer. That was not part of that culture. What we have here is super unique,” he said.
He and his partner have a small garden and are members of a CSA and do a lot of gardening in their parent’s larger gardens.
He is an avid reader of cookbooks and loves adapting recipes and creating his own. He loves baking sweet and savory starts and pies and makes his own crust from scratch, ditto his pizza dough.
“It’s hard to say what’s my favorite thing to cook. It changes by what’s available seasonally. My ethos is to take ingredients at their freshest and their best, for example when something is as fresh as asparagus has been, I don’t want to cover it with other flavors because it is incredible on its own,” he explained.
His passion for cooking is balanced by a passion for playing outside.
“My main source of exercise is biking. If I’m not cooking or working, I’m biking. In the winter I do some fat biking and back country snowboarding,” he said.
