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

episodes. I wrapped things in phyllo. I stuffed grape leaves. There were soufflés. I took a course in how to use a Cuisinart food processor.” My own such episodes began with a search in that dark-and-dirty basement, underneath our tenants’ flat, among all my old climbing gear, and my neglected surf boards, in order to find Liz’s old wok. Then came a cursory glance at
A Spoonful of Ginger
, by Nina Simonds, and a whole new tofu technique: pressing it in paper towels under a weight, to leach out excess water; then slicing and frying it hot, so it wouldn’t stick to the wok and disintegrate like it had all throughout my graduate school years; broccoli boiled a little first, and then tossed in tender, and then,
boom
, a bellyful.
    Still, the drumbeat deepens, the Anxiety Army grows closer. Natural nesting instincts provoked Liz to wish we had at least a few flower boxes beautifying the little patch of concrete we called a front yard. I wasn’t about to get punked by an actual carpenter again, so I bought
Better Homes and Gardens Step-by-Step Basic Carpentry
along with a Skil “worm-drive” circular saw, a “contractor grade” hammer, a “contractor grade” tape measure, and an embarrassingly new tool belt. I built and then hated and then destroyed and then rebuilt my first flower box about five times, anxious to get it right. Liking the outlet, I tackled our three-story back-stair assembly, a rickety pile running from our top-level flat down past the tenants’ street-level unit and then on down to the basement/backyard level: rotten to the core, it turned, far too dangerous for my pregnant girl. Endless rookie-carpenter screw ups meant endlesslumberyard trips—and an alarming number of carcinogenic asbestos-siding tiles breaking off the back of the house, releasing their toxic particles into the air. But an underemployed man in that position craves the excuse to put his head down and work like hell with his own body and hands, while his baby grows closer and a few thousand more of the wife’s dollars get spent on still more cool tools during early-morning drives out to the manly world of a place like Sierra Point Lumber, where I could smell the salty-cool bay and see the bright white fog up on San Bruno Mountain and learn how to speak confidently of two-by-eights and framing angles.
    Liz really was a nauseous pregnant lady, and she didn’t always want vegetarian kung pao, so I did make that Garden Tomato and Garlic Pasta once in a while. I came to appreciate the quick and definitive way in which Alice had made me markedly better at a useful and tolerably masculine chore that also included filling up my belly. But still, the conditions weren’t yet right for total
Vegetables
immersion. Even if I did think of building on my positive tomato experience, I didn’t consider doing it through Alice’s Beet-Green Pasta, or Broccoli Raab Pasta. I had not the slightest idea what beet greens and broccoli raab even were, but they both sounded healthy, and therefore I could not see how either could be worth eating—an adult version of the three-year-old’s view,
Even though Mommy wants me to taste bacon, I’ve never heard of it, so it’s probably rat poison
. So I tried to replicate that Garden Tomato competence-experience in ways that called for no meaningful change in my self: seeking out a book to help me tackle this other go-to restaurant dish we’d both liked in our pre-pregnancy days, the Chicken Tikka from Shalimar.
The Bombay Cafe
, by Neela Paniz, led us to the discovery of an old dusty Indian grocery in the Mission District, bringing self-congratulation at being sourban-adventurous, and then repeated mention of same to our friends (“And you’ve just
got
to check out this amazing old Indian shop on Valencia”). Paniz had included a few other Indian-restaurant standards—Lentil Dahl, Curried Eggplant—so Liz suspended