The Longest Date: Life as a Wife

by Cindy Chupack

  I never thought I’d be asked if we’d be willing to celebrate Easter, too, but after five years of our own egg hunt trying to find one that would produce a child, Ian and I were almost willing to accept Jesus as our savior in order to complete our family. What’s a little chocolate, I thought? A few Peeps? Does Easter have to be about Jesus? I don’t remember seeing Jesus in the Williams-Sonoma or Pottery Barn Easter catalog.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. It was still early in our relationship, and we were just getting cooking. . . .

  Now We’re Cooking?

  Name your favorite four ingredients, and we’ll build a meal around them.” Ian proposed this challenge to our friend Kimberly early in our marriage.

  I was dubious. Ian was good in the kitchen, but he was no Iron Chef, and I grew up thinking basic ingredients were Lipton onion soup mix, Fritos, French dressing, and Bisquick. I still have recipes from my sister that call for Dr. Pepper or root beer in things like briskets and cakes, but thanks to the great restaurants of New York, Los Angeles, and beyond (famous and hole-in-the-wall ethnic), I now know that green beans can exist outside of a casserole, that most people don’t even call 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 tomatoes with the folks who grew them. I will buy fresh parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (while humming the song, of course), amazed that I ever used the dry versions. Somehow this new language—food—allows me to engage in long, passionate, mouthwatering conversations with anybody, anywhere, anytime.

  That is something else I never cared to do before I married Ian. I would like to say that Ian taught me the beauty of talking to strangers, but the truth is, marrying someone means that even if you didn’t used to want to talk to strangers, you may want to start talking to strangers, because, unlike your husband, they at least have something new to say.

  Is that terrible? Am I a terrible person? I love Ian’s stories. But I have heard most of them. And he has heard most of mine. Let’s listen to a stranger for a while. Let’s invite friends over. Let’s have a dinner party! Let’s make new stories!

  Step Three: Apologize. To Ian. For what I just said, since he has heard my stories over and over, even read them over and over, and he’s still allowing me to share my stories about him in this book.

  But since I brought it up (she says, unable to let it go), I do find this to be a very confusing part of partnership, which inevitably comes up when you’re entertaining together. I’m a good storyteller, Ian’s a good storyteller, we met at a storytelling event, so who knew my biggest question about marriage would be: what the hell am I supposed to do when Ian is telling friends a story I’ve heard a million times? Am I supposed to pretend I’ve never heard it? Should I say, “Oh, this is a great one!” (whether it is or not) so I don’t have to hang on to every word like everybody else? Can I go to the bathroom or clear dishes instead? Can I start my own conversation, or is that rude, because I’m depriving someone else of his story? What if I know that other people at the table already know the story? Am I allowed to say that? Can I finish it for him? Where is the book that answers these questions? Is it supposed to be this book? I hope not, because I don’t know the answer, just like I don’t know how I ended up preparing dishes my family has never heard of for people they have heard of, like the Chilled Cauliflower Soup with Sevruga Caviar that I whipped up—in eight hours—for Lisa Kudrow and her husband. (We met them at a friend’s wedding in Colorado, and by the reception, Ian had invited them to dinner.)

  Incidentally, Lisa Kudrow and her husband seemed genuinely delighted and entertained by each other’s stories, as were we (by their stories), although I didn’t get to participate in the talking as much I would have liked, because I got completely carried away with (and intimidated by) my own menu planning.

  Step Four: Plan. Like I said, we are not Iron Chefs. We need more than an hour to plan (not to mention shop for) a meal, especially if someone (Ian) decides the duck needs to be bought in Chinatown. Or if that same someone further complicates the challenge by promising to use the ingredients “in an unexpected way.”

  For example, at our first four-ingredient meal, Kimberly’s grandmother’s apple pie became an apple martini with graham cracker rim. (Ian considers a cocktail a first course.) The chocolate showed up in a Mexican mole sauce for chicken (not, as I had assumed, in my cookies). The brie was baked and served with sli
ced pears as an appetizer, which now seems altogether too obvious, but we needed one ace in the hole. And dessert was a homemade pear sorbet, which we made with store-bought pear juice in an ice cream maker that until then had been gathering frost in our freezer.

  For that first dinner, Ian did most of the menu planning, and I just helped execute the meal (in a good way, not in an “I killed it” way, like I did with the London broil).

  But just as I started to get into it with these dinners, Ian started to get out of it. This might be because I’m a perfectionist (or “bossy,” as he might say), but eventually, it seemed like the division of labor became: Ian does the inviting, and I do everything else. Until the day of, when together we dice, slice, and cook for twelve hours straight—me running around like a game show contestant, Ian using every pot, pan, and gadget we own to make things I still find too complicated (like soufflés, rack of lamb, homemade pasta, salt-baked fish), often improvising items we did not discuss, like four giant homemade raviolis stuffed with lobster instead of little individual ones (not completely successful, but Ian was still pleased with the originality of it)—and suddenly the guests show up, at which point I realize I didn’t leave time to shower, and Ian quickly serves drinks and is the perfect host as I smile and pretend to listen to their stories of the day (which was the point!) while simultaneously rereading the recipe for spring pea risotto with lemon and mint or whatever else I have overambitiously put on the menu.

  And I’m talking about actual menus—my idea—because when I took over menu planning, although I hadn’t cooked a lot, I’d dined out a lot, so I knew about menus. I knew when a meal sounded delicious, when you could taste every dish just by reading its description, when a chef’s tasting menu enabled you to imagine the flow from amuse-bouche to dessert. And about the “amuse-bouche”: once I started cooking, I found myself thinking, at restaurants, I could put some sushi-grade tuna on a potato chip. We have a meat slicer; I could make the potato chips. I began to realize I could make almost anything once I found a recipe, and I could even vary the recipe. I was becoming fearless, at least when it came to menu planning. So I started the tradition of printing menus for each of these dinners, which raised the bar and the stakes, because you can’t nix a course once it’s in print.

  But I have never become fearless about failure. Ian always says, “Who cares? If a dish fails, we’ll order a pizza.”

  But what if the dish that fails is a pizza? I wanted to know. And what if we’re making that pizza for someone like Stanley Tucci? (I was working with Stanley Tucci at the time, but, of course, it was Ian who offered up a four-ingredient dinner.) Just as a reminder, Stanley Tucci co-wrote and co-directed The Big Night, a movie that was a celebration of Italian cooking based on his family’s recipes, recipes that were not on a bag of chocolate chips but have been published in the beautiful, full-color The Tucci Cookbook (which had originally been published as Cucina & Famiglia—that’s how authentically Italian these recipes were), and I promised, on the printed menu, a pizza from said cookbook. I can’t even blame Ian for that. It was my idea, for some reason, to make a pizza using Stanley Tucci’s grandmother’s recipe for pizza dough! And as he politely examined the elasticity of the dough, I thought, I only just learned how to cook! Why am I competing over pizza with Stanley Tucci’s Italian grandmother?

  But then this lovely man (Stanley Tucci, not Ian) showed me how to transfer the pizza onto a pizza stone—that stone being another item from our registry that I never thought we’d use—and there I was (me, who was once afraid to make biscuits without Bisquick!) making a prosciutto, goat cheese, and arugula pizza from scratch, drizzled with aged balsamic, for one of my favorite actor/writer/directors, and we all agreed it could not have been more delicious. It was a fun, luscious Big Night, and I felt as if I was graduating from something, maybe from fear.

  Step Five: Vodka. Did I mention the vodka? Vodka is helpful because it lessens my need for perfection, along with our guests’. After Ian came up with the idea of a liquid first course, our guests’ ingredients starting making their way into vodka infusions. And now, with at least four infusions going at any one time, even if a meal is a disaster, nobody complains. Or drives home, for that matter. My discovery: if it would make a good ice cream or sorbet (blood orange, apple/cinnamon, candied pumpkin, fresh fig), it would make a good vodka. Ian’s discovery: tasting our infusions every night to see when they’re perfectly ready does not make for a better vodka; it makes for a drunk husband. We finally agreed that it might be healthier for him to stop “testing” the vodkas and leave that to our guests, especially since Ian never felt the need to pretest anything else we served our guests (e.g., giant lobster raviolis). We had some failures (cherry vodka tasted like cough syrup; pizza-flavored vodka—another off-book idea of Ian’s—tasted like oregano and tomato gone bad), but my candied pumpkin vodka (which is a labor of love) tasted like a labor of love, and became our signature vodka, which Ian begs me to make every fall. Vodka also helps when dinner is late, which ours inevitably is, because Ian likes to involve guests in the cooking, so the meal, by design, can’t be ready when guests arrive.

  Step Six: Involve Guests. I used to think letting friends help with the cooking meant asking someone to chop celery for the salad, but Ian will hand a guest a recipe for fish wrapped in banana leaves along with some banana leaves and wish them good luck. This might seem rude. It might be rude. But our friends have enjoyed the challenges we’ve thrown at them, like filling tamales or shaping their own homemade pasta. It lets them take pride in the meal, and helps me not panic (as much) when guests arrive and we’re still frying Brussels sprout leaves for the rosemary sea-salt Brussels sprout crisps that I put on the menu as an appetizer.

  Every so often I will catch Ian’s eye and make it clear that something is not coming out as planned, and he will come kiss me and show me that it’s not so bad—it just needs lemon, more garlic, more hands—and he will take over, or put someone else in charge, and somehow it all works out. These dinners always feel completely disorganized to me, which is something I will never get used to, but Ian loves the chaos of people cooking together. He doesn’t even see it as chaos. He has no problem rushing out for more groceries ten minutes before everyone arrives, because he trusts that those groceries will turn into a beautiful dish with a little teamwork. And he’s right. It’s like a magic trick (a magic trick that takes several hours to clean up, but that’s another chapter). Maybe we eat at 10 P.M., but as a novice chef, every time a meal turns out, I feel as if we pulled a rabbit out of a hat. And ate it. And it was delicious.

  Step Seven: Involve Professionals. Ian and I decided it’s not cheating to buy a course or two. In fact, it can be fun (albeit expensive) to include the world’s best crab cakes flown in fresh from Baltimore if a guest chooses crab as one of her ingredients, or even if she hasn’t. It’s sometimes comforting to know that at least one course will be edible and worry-free, so we have flown in Faidley’s crab cakes, Eileen’s cheesecakes, Varsano’s chocolates, Lobel’s steaks, and my mom’s cookies (she makes more than just Toll House cookies, and they’re always crowd-pleasers).

  Step Eight: Enjoy. This, for me, might be the hardest part, to relax and “enjoy” the evening when I know there are still four courses that need our attention, but I do find that if we invite only two to four people, instead of eight (which seems to be Ian’s minimum), I have a shot at enjoying the dinner as much as our guests. I love when a group is small enough to have one conversation; otherwise, it always seems that giant bursts of laughter are coming from the end of the table where I am not. A small group means the cooking is more manageable, and you don’t miss any laughs. And there are always plenty, because this is a long, luxurious, many-course night, and it does seem that when you share your home, people seem more comfortable sharing their stories.

  And these are stories I have not heard!

  So, once the dinner is under way, whether it’s working or not, I
try (which is also a process) to be in the moment and enjoy. I try to let the dishes pile up. I try to let the time between courses lag. I try to take in what is happening, because it is still astounding to me the meals and the friendships we have made.

  We’ve invited couples we didn’t know so well who have become great friends. We’ve cooked for houseguests, like my best friend from college and her husband (who chose rhubarb, not because he wanted to make life difficult, but because his mother makes a killer rhubarb crisp, and now I love cooking with rhubarb). I included a colleague who later became one of my dearest friends, Padma (Atluri, not Lakshmi), because she happened to mention she loved pumpkin when we were already planning a dinner that featured pumpkin (the birth of my famous pumpkin vodka). So sometimes the ingredients dictate the guest list, and sometimes the person who picks the ingredients dictates the guest list by bringing a few friends along for the treat. Once we invited four friends and let each pick one ingredient.

  Surrendering control of everything from the ingredients to the guest list, trusting other people’s choices, trusting Ian that the night will work out . . . I have to admit, it’s all been good for me. Not easy. But good. Before marrying Ian, I never would have tried to update Peking duck (it’s an ancient recipe!), but our roasted duck with farmers’ market scallions and homemade thyme pancakes with pomegranate reduction was one of the most delicious dishes I have had anywhere, and I had it in my living room.

  I guess the old me did operate from fear when it came to entertaining. I would buy food in advance. I would try to visualize how everyone would get along, try to bulletproof the evening. But just as I’ve learned that any four ingredients can be the basis of a great meal, I’ve learned that we can enjoy any combination of the people we love, because if each guest is special and amazing to us, by dessert they’ll find one another just as special and amazing.