How to Cook a Moose Read Online Free PDF Page A

a 10 oz. bag of frozen peas, and 1/4 cup vegetable broth. Cook 5 minutes until peas are tender.
    Add 1 1/2 cups Pomi chopped tomatoes, salt and pepper, and crushed red pepper. (It should be smelling deeply good by now.)
    Let it simmer on medium-low heat for 15 more minutes, until it’s thick.
    Toss with 1 lb. freshly cooked hot pasta (fettuccine or penne is best) and serve with Parmesan cheese.
    Serves 2 with leftovers; cures everything.

    By the fall of 2011, the facts suggested that I had left New York for good: For the past two and a half years, I’d been traveling a lot and otherwise living with Brendan in New Hampshire. Leaving New York had been a protracted, bittersweet process, and there were still times, even though I was deliriously happy up here, when I missed New York—dinner parties, late nights in good old bars. Most of my friends lived down there.
    But I didn’t want to go back. I loved our life up here. I loved how isolated and wild it felt, not seeing any lights at night. I loved how pristine it was, the wild animals, the nearby lake. We drove our trash to the dump ourselves, and that was just fine with me, because I didn’t miss the early morning din of garbage trucks. It felt strange in the best way to live in such quiet. By the time I left New York and moved up here, my entire being felt as if it had shaped itself around the familiarity of urban life, so completely I’d hardly noticed any of it anymore—traffic noises, sidewalks full of crowds, strong smells, twenty-four-hour lights, the crash and squeal of the subways, the constant sense of millions of people around me. Now I felt all my internal muscles relaxing with relief; I hadn’t even realized they’d been so tense and clutched.
    But after two decades in New York, it did take a while for me to become accustomed to this region’s ways and mores. Needless to say,the White Mountains are an entirely different country from New York City. The landscape was foreign to me at first, even exotic: wild, open vistas, thick woods full of spirits, farm stands, inns, and ski slopes bald in the summertime on nearby mountains. The people are English, Irish, Scots-Irish, Acadian—noses are sharp, hair blond, as often as not. English is spoken here, as it is in New York, but it’s not Yiddish-inflected, it’s not undergirded with the three most urgent questions of New York parlance: How much rent do you pay? What do you do? Who do you know? In New York, I spoke a rapid shorthand patois. After I moved up here, I slowly learned the local dialect: wry, understated, with a quick, merry fatalism that feels nineteenth-century. The questions undergirding conversations here seem to be: How do you heat your house? Who’s your family? Working hard, or hardly working? (This last is apparently a hilarious local joke that never gets old.)
    In New York, I was a writer among my own kind, a pigeon competing for bread crumbs, perched on windowsills with the other pigeons united in a throaty, guttural, communal recitative about editors, advances, bad reviews. In New Hampshire, the people I first met—I couldn’t call them friends because I hadn’t been here long enough to have made real friends; that takes years—were doctors, woodworkers, lawyers, and what used to be called “landed gentry,” as well as a few painters and musicians.
    Besides Brendan, I knew only one other writer, a playwright who came for vacations and sabbaticals. In the White Mountains, we few writers seemed to be treated as a slightly dangerous exotic species. Several times, I heard half-jokes about not telling me anything, or it might end up in a book. People here struck me as fiercely private; they minded their own business and trusted that you would do the same, which was a soothing relief after the relentless gossip of the city.
    Sometimes, staying in the isolated farmhouse with my true love, I caught myself feeling as if I were