Read Online The Longest Date: Life as a Wife by Cindy Chupack - Free Book Online Page A

them green beans, and that the best recipes don’t have “surprise” in their names.
    Before I married Ian, the only dish I felt completely confident making was chocolate chip cookies. I’m not apologizing—I make
great
cookies, sweet and salty and perfectly undercooked and chewy, but I never strayed from our family recipe. I did, one day, realize that our family recipe was eerily similar to the one printed on the package of Nestlé Toll House Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels, which were an
ingredient
in our family recipe, so nobody even thought to hide the evidence. Apparently it wasn’t necessary, because it’s only right at this moment, as I’m writing this, that I’m remembering it was not a family “chocolate chip cookie” recipe; it was a family “Toll House cookie” recipe, which, I guess, should have tipped me off, but I always thought Toll House cookies were chocolate chip cookies and vice versa, in the same way that Kleenex are tissues to everyone except people working at rival tissue companies. And still, even after discovering that the Chupack cookie legacy was, literally, ripped off a bag of chocolate chips (with one important modification: we were using Crisco instead of butter, thus making the cookies even more fattening than usual), I never so much as substituted butterscotch chips for chocolate—that’s what a culinary coward I was when I was single.
    My cowardice didn’t stop me from throwing dinner parties, especially while I was living in New York, but at my parties the entire spread (except for our fraudulent family cookies) was from Balducci’s. At one such dinner party, a friend who is an excellent
cook walked in on me heating up slices of store-bought London broil. As I pulled the baking sheet out of the oven, revealing the grayish-brown meat, he looked at me as if I had just wrecked a Porsche. I think there were tears in his eyes. London broil, I now understand, should be served gorgeously medium rare, and the difference between “heating something up” and “cooking it” is not an insignificant one.
    But since that first delicious evening with Kimberly (she chose as her four ingredients: pear, brie, chocolate, and her grandmother’s apple pie), the “four-ingredient meal” has become Ian’s favorite mode of entertaining and my favorite extreme sport. Here’s how it works:
    Step One: Invite. You need to be comfortable bragging, as Ian is. I can now count on him to offer up a four-ingredient meal to any of our friends, friends of friends, colleagues, and even famous people we barely know who happen to mention a fondness for food. His offer, and their subsequent acceptance (which is inevitable, because he makes the prospect sound so delectable), always sends me into a panic, even though every four-ingredient meal we’ve done to date has been much tastier than I ever could have imagined.
    Step Two: Panic. It would be lovely not to panic, but I fear “fear” is part of my process. Panic leads to creativity. This is true in everything I do, from writing to cooking. For me, lack of panic means lack of caring. Thanks to panic, I find myself up late at night (while Ian peacefully sleeps) Googling various combinations of our guests’ requested ingredients, like “rhubarb and balsamic vinegar” or “pomegranate and duck” to find inspiration and direction. I read indexes of never-cracked-open cookbooks to see which dishes call for figs or pistachio nuts. I visit stores that sell only spices, sections of the supermarket that I never knew existed, or my new favorite gourmet shop, where I will find myself debating the merits of various forms of ingredients, like truffle paste, truffle carpaccio, truffle salt, and truffle oil. I will ask the produce people which pears are best this time of year, and they will have helpful and well-reasoned answers. I will go to the farmers’ market (a real one, not the one that is now part of an outdoor mall on Fairfax), where I’ll discuss heirloom