Read Online How to Cook Like a Man by Daniel Duane - Free Book Online Page B

alike.” But I craved that sense of belonging and I had a perfectly reasonable membership claim to precisely this imaginary clique.
    I’d also run aground a little, with
Chez Panisse Vegetables
. Having finished all the soups, salads, and pastas, I’d been looking at a hundred-plus vegetable side dishes. Liz rightly wondered, during one dinner I made for friends, why anybody outside prefamine Ireland would serve a banquet consisting of potato pasta, potato gratin, a side of sautéed potato slices, and a platter of roasted fingerling potatoes. Unwilling to repeat dishes, I therefore neededa new raft of mains for my recipe-ticking mania. The
Chez Panisse Café Cookbook
, which I already owned, offered an obvious first step toward a solution. “We have paid special attention to the ingredients we left out of …
Vegetables
,” Alice wrote, also in that introduction: “fish and shellfish, meat and poultry, eggs and cheese.” In short, everything a man wanted to eat. Simply in broadening my mission, I realized, and redefining it as an assault on the entire Chez Panisse cookbook oeuvre, I could squeeze through this frightening little bottleneck by combining mains from the
Café
book and even others, like
Chez Panisse Cooking
, by longtime Chez Panisse chef Paul Bertolli, with all the
Vegetables
outliers. And that’s how I fell truly under Alice’s spell, her vision of a broader community—Paul Bertolli among its leading lights, along with various other cookbook authors—living the grand Chez Panisse lifestyle.
    â€œOne of my partners had befriended a farm family in Amador County in the Sierra foothills who kept a few hogs and who had agreed to supply us with suckling pigs,” Alice writes, and so I showed up at the Marin Sun Farms booth at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, and I tried to befriend the poor rancher while I scored the goods for Long-Cooked Pork Shoulder, Simple Cured Pork Chops, and Roast Pork Loin with Rosemary and Fennel. Somebody named Nancy Warner and her family, according to Alice, slept outdoors “with the chickens to protect them from attacks by coyotes and roaming packs of dogs,” and who wouldn’t like to feel that a slumber party might replace cyanide-laced deer carcasses and government “predator control” specialists? And, thus, I bought “pastured” Marin Sun Farms chickens for Pollo al Mattone with Lemon and Garlic, Chicken Ballotine with Chanterelles, and Grilled Chicken Breasts au Poivre. Nobody made business arrangements in Alice’s new/old Berkeley; they befriendedpeople. The restaurant didn’t offer anything as tawdry as seasonal specials; it just hewed to “cherished traditions” like “serving spring lambs from the Dal Porto Ranch,” as if Alice and company were a big collective grail knight, bringing bourgeois fertility to blighted modern America.
    Now we’re really living, see, especially with Hannah crossing some developmental milestone bringing the world beyond Mommy into focus. Precocious talker and tentative walker, she took notice first of the dog, discovering that this hairy animal really was on Hannah’s and Mommy’s team, a part of their tribe; but next in line came the dawning awareness that a third human being lived in the house. Soon, my cuddles, once utterly useless at calming Hannah, acquired a modest but accelerating effect on her tantrums; my pancakes began to elicit a cautious interest, especially when she got me to serve the syrup on the side, in a little cream pitcher, so she could drink it all in one gulp. Thus, all the non-remunerative time required for all-
Café
dinners like Duck Legs Braised in Zinfandel, Grilled Endives with Sauce Gribiche, and Lindsey’s Chocolate Cake with Sicilian Sabayon felt not like evasion—not like running from the Great American Novel I knew I’d have to abandon, sometime soon—so much as celebration, insistence