Ode to Rob

I think I have not been clear enough about the joys of having a chef live in your house. There was a time in DC when personal chefs were getting popular and people would come to your house and cook you a week or two worth of meals and leave it in your freezer and go. This seemed to me a luxury I would never be able to afford--and maybe wouldn’t really want. After all, I quite like to cook. But if you get the chance, I totally recommend the strategy of having your best friend get trained as a chef and move in with you. It has benefits that are nearly too numerous to count in the length of this train ride. I’ll try though.

The first benefit happens on the nights I work. Last night, for example, I worked in town and got home at 6, as I always do. Coming home to kids who need attention and food that needs to be cooked is always a trial. I know that I should prepare something for E, who looks after our children, to pop in the oven before we get home, but I have managed that level of preplanning only ONCE in the year that I’ve lived here. Last night, though, instead of giving the kids a quick hug, racing to pull off my work clothes and change into my home clothes so that I could throw together something fast and adequate for dinner, I came home to Rob, cheerful in the kitchen, making the house smell delicious. He and E and the kids had already made a “science/ baking experiment” for dessert—seven little chocolate candies, thick slabs of dark chocolate on the bottom with a layer of homemade caramel on top. Dessert finished, Rob was cooking on his own—dinner.

He served the meal 15 minutes after we walked in the house: homemade three cheese ravioli in a sage brown butter sauce. This meal, cooked by my friend in my very own kitchen, was sublime—one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. We sat at the table and drank wine and ate salad with Rob’s fresh honey mustard vinaigrette, and we all moaned out loud with nearly every bite (Aidan had thirds).

There are serious benefits for the nights I don’t work, too. Then Rob will decide what the dinner is and I’ll help, or I’ll decide and he’ll help. We’ll cook together—often with Melissa or Michael or a kid or two—and he’ll make everything I make better than it would be if he weren’t there. I’m a pretty good cook, but he’s fantastic, and he can be totally complementary and supportive at the same time he’s making suggestions that take my cooking to a different level.

And then there’s the benefit of having a chef around and thinking like a chef. Even if he never cooked anything again, even if he didn’t pick up a knife to slice carrots into exactly even julienne strips, I would still learn just by going to the market with him and hearing him think out loud about food. He thinks like an artist: How about this ingredient plus this one? I’ve never seen this veggie before, let’s buy one and sauté it. Don’t throw out that too-ripe fruit: let’s make sorbet. And so on. I have the chance to get inside the thinking of a chef and to hear about how things go together and how I could experiment more to see which new combinations there are to create in the world. And I would be a better cook even if he modeled nothing but his thinking.

Ah, but homemade pad thai on the porch after a day on the beach or the freshest spring rolls I’ve ever had on a warm evening (and with no cilantro!) or grilled peaches and apricots, hot and sweetly dripping—these are delights I’ll hold with me a long long time. The fact that he’s our oldest friend and can remember our wedding and our first dog and me at 17—this just shows how careful a preplanner I really am. After all, who needs to prepare a casserole when you can just make friends with a chef a couple of decades before culinary school!

postscript: We've come home from a date where Rob-the-wonderful has taken care of our children and we have gone out for dinner which was totally less good than Rob's food, alas. Pictures today are of Rob's favorite head shot, Aidan climbing the walls inside the house, and Aidan and me in front of the new house.