How to Cook Like a Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

followed Alice’s instructions for Garden Tomato and Garlic Pasta, dicingthree “perfectly ripe tomatoes,” peeling and chopping three cloves of garlic and a bunch of basil leaves, and then accepting Alice’s entirely novel command to “have all the ingredients prepared and ready by the stove.” Next up, I set a “heavy-bottomed skillet” on a burner, lit the burner with a match, and glugged in a
half cup
of extra-virgin olive oil, which completely blew my mind. That was basically all that was left in our bottle, and it was probably like a full dollar’s worth and about four hundred calories:
Man, okay
, I thought,
this is some serious restaurant-style cooking
. But I did as told: warming the oil first, tossing in the garlic and “right away, before the garlic starts to brown,” adding the tomatoes and stirring, which completely confused me, because I’d always, always browned garlic. I’d thought that was the whole point. Equally perplexing: Alice said the tomatoes “will probably spatter a little,” and they didn’t. Oil not hot enough, apparently. But, onward: add the basil and “cook just a minute or two, until the tomatoes are warmed through and have started to relax.”
    Tomatoes, relaxing?
    â€œHey, will you remind me,” Liz said, as we ate with the back door open to the warm dusk, “why we want to wait a few more years to have a baby?”
    A first hint, in other words, of the anxiety that would soon make
Vegetables
—and, therefore, tomato relaxation—a worthy place to hide. Overall, however, we were leading what I considered the idyllic life: Liz wrote magazine articles in one of the front bedrooms while I flailed at writing the Great American Novel in the other. We used our little living room as a bedroom, and our life felt like an unbroken stream of interesting work, movies, exercise, romantic bliss, and beer. Liz didn’t much care for wine, but she loved a good IPA, especially after a long run inGolden Gate Park. So I couldn’t fathom why anybody would pursue change, much less the headache of cooking actual recipes. But then it began:
    â€œJust remind me,” Liz said. “I’m getting confused. When we said a couple years, did we mean a couple years to birth or conception?”
    â€œMore pasta?”
    â€œI don’t want to be an old parent.”
    â€œI’ll get you pasta.”
    â€œBut tell me how long you really want to wait, just so I know.”
    â€œI love our life the way it is.”
    â€œTwo years?”
    Shortly thereafter, for the first time in my whole entire chickenshit existence, I was a young man with a happily pregnant wife. Two weeks later still, giddy with hope and excitement, Liz drove herself clear across San Francisco to the Kaiser Permanente hospital for the initial prenatal checkup—letting me take a pass because she’s great like that, always joking that she ought to be more of a demanding, high-maintenance bitch, but constitutionally incapable of being anything but accommodating. Meanwhile, I sat at my desk—a solid-core door supported by two cheap file cabinets—looking out my tall window at the yellow house on the other side and trying not to hyperventilate, thinking I was totally screwed and I had to finish this novel
so fast
before my life ended and I had to get a lobotomy and become a CPA just to pay the bills and then slip into a depression and kill myself because I’m not capable of adapting to any existence except the absolutely perfectly orderly and peaceful one I’d already gotten mastered before I somehow lost my way and agreed to have a baby.
    The phone rang: Liz, sobbing, saying the sonogram found only what they’d called a “blighted ovum.” No heartbeat, in other words. No baby.
    I wasn’t a total pig, so I felt a freaky admixture of intense concern for my hurting girl, average-to-middling sorrow about our