Cookin' for Love: A Novel with Recipes

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

READING GUIDE

INTERVIEW WITH SHARON BOORSTIN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ONE

"Cheesecake is sexy, I agree with Kimberly, whose sports bra can barely contain her made-in-Beverly-Hills breasts. But not when it’s prepared with fat-free cream cheese, fat-free sour cream, Egg Beaters, and Splenda. I place what I’ve dubbed the cheesecake wannabe" on the kitchen counter. Without a crust, it looks naked, and it sags in the middle, like an old mattress.

Kimberly blinks at it through her peacock-blue contact lenses. It does kinda suck? Her Valley-girl uplift turns everything she says into a question.

Look, it’s your cookbook, Kimberly, and I know you asked me to come up with a low-cal, low-carb cheesecake, but I strongly advise we go with this one instead.

Like a sculptor unveiling her latest oeuvre, I whip off the aluminum foil covering another cheesecake*. Perched regally on a Waterford cut-crystal plate, with a graham-cracker crust as thick as a cookie and a sour cream topping glistening like satin, it screams calories. I based this on my Grandma Estelle’s recipe, I say proudly. Only I separated the eggs and beat the whites stiff before folding them in. From the look on Kimberly’s face, the cooking jargon flies right past her. What did I expect? In her line of work, the words beating and stiff are not used in reference to egg whites.

I offer Kimberly a fork. Why don’t we do a taste test?

She flicks her wheat-blond hair behind her ear. I...I’m not really hungry.

Okay, here is a beautiful and sexy, but not particularly sharp, 25-year-old who could not possibly weigh more than 103 pounds, much of which is silicone. What’s going through her pretty pea brain? Is she afraid that if she takes one bite of cheesecake, she won’t look as hot in the mini dress she wore in Murder in Malibu, a straight-to-DVD movie in which she starred? That her boyfriend-the-producer won’t cast her in his next one? But even if he is paying me to ghostwrite her book and create the recipes, how can Kimberly put her name on A Starlet’s Secrets of Sexy Cooking without tasting them?

Who am I trying to kid? No one who pays $24.95 for the book, which will be filled with cheesecake photos of Kimberly, will be buying it for the cheesecake—or any of the 63—recipes. Talk about irony: If they only knew that the real author of A Starlet’s Secrets of Sexy Cooking is a 40-something mom in elastic-waist jeans and an apron, whose idea of sexy is eating Haagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche straight from the carton.

The clatter of size-twelve Doc Martens on the stairs and the door to the kitchen swings open. Ooops. Didn’t know you were in here. Jake, my 18-year-old son slouches in, the gel on his spiked brown hair glistening like a freshly waxed floor. Like hell he didn’t know we were in here. He is shirtless, and his jeans hang so low on his hips, that his Calvins show. (The Calvins-showing thing is the in style; we argued about it a couple of weeks ago; Jake won.) Our air-conditioning doesn’t quite cut it during the dog days of August, but I’m sure that Jake’s shirtless look isn’t because of the heat. It’s to show off his pecs and abs to Kimberly. I have to admit that they’re impressive for a basically beanpole kid, the result of lifting weights every morning in his bedroom. From the number of times Jake has dropped the barbells and sent me bolting for the door yelling, "Earthquake!" though, I’d say he’s overdoing it.

Kimberly smiles coyly at Jake. Hey, how’s it goin’?

Hey, Kim. Jake’s face is turning as pink as a watermelon, and I can tell that he is trying with all his might not to look at what my husband Alan would joke are Kimberly’s melons. My son might complain that the other boys at Beverly Hills High School, from which he graduated in June, get to drive BMWs, Mercedes, and Lexuses, while he is stuck with his mom’s old Volvo, which he has to share with his twin sister Emma. But how many of those boys can boast that Hollywood starlets hang out at their house—even if it is just to work with their mom?

I elbow Jake away and hold out the fork to Kimberly. Take a bite of each, decide which is best. She blinks rapidly, her blue-black tinted eyelashes fluttering like hummingbird wings.

Kim, you gotta trust my mom. Jake snatches the fork from me. When it comes to cooking, she rocks. (Meaning at everything else I suck?) He scoops up a clump of the cheesecake wannabe, takes a bite, and dashes to the sink and spits it out. Like Marlon Brando after a brawl in On the Waterfront, he wipes his mouth on his arm. No way can you put that recipe in your cookbook, Kim.

"I can’t?"

People will blow chunks! They’ll pray to the porcelain god! Jake eats a forkful of the real cheesecake. But this... He closes his eyes. "This is awesome!"

I stifle a laugh. Doing his shtick, Jake reminds me of Alan—the early Alan. My husband has changed so much over the years that it’s hard to remember him as the playful guy I married. Jake even looks a little like Alan looked in those days, though Alan had a ‘fro and a George Harrison moustache. I remember how it tickled me when we kissed.

Jake stuffs more of the good cheesecake into his mouth, gesturing for Kimberly to help herself. She bursts out laughing, revealing Smile Brite teeth as white as the keys on a Steinway. Yep, I think, Jake inherited his father’s funny gene. I just hope life brings Jake enough of what he wants so when he reaches the ripe old age of 50, unlike his dad, he is still happy enough to enjoy making people laugh—and to enjoy kissing his wife.

Like a mom trying to coax a colicky baby to eat, Jake holds out a forkful of the good cheesecake for Kimberly. She allows it to touch her collagen-pumped lips, as if her taste buds are hidden under the pink lip gloss. Okay, you’re right, she admits with a breathy sigh. It’s yummy.

All right! Jake holds up his hand to slap Kimberly high five.

Instead, she places her hand on the flat, golden-tanned patch of belly that is peeking between her sports bra and Spandex work-out shorts, as if reassuring herself that the morsel of food didn’t do any damage. "Just so readers believe it’s my recipe," she says. I promise her that they will, collect the check that she owes me, and show her out.

Recipe Tester/Cookbook Consultant is an odd answer to fill into the Occupation blank on a life-insurance application, but it sounds better than "With Cookbook Author, which is what I am. Some of my clients are celebrities or would-be or has-been" celebrities, people who can cook but don’t have time, or who think they can cook just like they think they can act. I Withed a certain big-breasted, small-waisted country-and-western singer’s down-home cookbook. (There’s a woman with no fear of lard.) I also Withed the health-and-fitness cookbook of a certain over-the-hill singer/actress more famous for her belly button than her talent, though I left out a recipe for removing your bottom ribs, one of her slimming secrets.

Withing a cookbook for a Hollywood starlet who has a reputation, to use Alan’s term, as a Stollywood Harlot, however, is a new low for me. Kimberly doesn’t even pretend to know how to cook. When A Starlet’s Secrets of Sexy Cooking comes out next year, Kimberly Smith will get the By credit on the cover. And at the launch party that her boyfriend-the-producer throws at Spago, while everyone nibbles on ahi tuna in mini-sesame-miso cones, she will sign copies of the book with Let’s Party! in her childlike scrawl. My With Miriam Epstein Levy credit will be in tiny letters somewhere near the bottom of the cover—and it will be the first time that I don’t care when no one asks for my autograph.

How does one end up as a professional With cookbook author? In my case the seed was planted at Epstein’s Deli in Buffalo, where I spent many a day after school when I was growing up. In the kitchen, I helped my Grandma Estelle bake cheesecakes and stir the big pot of chicken soup that was always simmering on the stove. My mother had coaxed my father to join her parents’ business when my grandfather died, so I helped him make bagels. This was the early Sixties, when bagels only came in two flavors—plain and poppy seed.

Where was my mother during all this? A Parliament cigarette staining her fingers, she manned the cash register and worked the dining room, laying a guilt trip on customers who didn’t clear their plates:

"What’s the matter? You didn’t like it?" My mother is the queen of guilt trips. To this day, she still manages to drag me along for the ride.

Unlike my mother, I love to cook, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in the kitchen of Epstein’s Deli. I knew that one day my brother Denny would end up manning the cash register, and he was likely to steal me blind. With the encouragement of Mrs. Brown, my favorite English teacher, I won a scholarship to Mills, a women’s college in Oakland, California, where I earned a teaching credential. Teaching is a good profession for a woman, Mrs. Brown advised me. You can always fall back on it if your husband loses his job or, God forbid, (as in her case) he drops dead.

Though I was on the hunt, I didn’t bag a husband while I was in college, so after I graduated, I moved to Los Angeles to teach English at a private school that catered to the flaky sons and daughters of flaky Hollywood producers. I met Alan soon thereafter and we got married the following August. A month later I returned to teaching and I taught for the next 11 years. The reason wasn’t exactly because my husband lost his job. Screenwriting is only a job if you’re getting paid for it.

Most screenwriters write on spec, as Alan did when he graduated from UCLA Film School. It was a miracle that a month later he sold his first screenplay. By miracle, I mean that his father, Dr. Walter Levy, the Beverly Hills ear-nose-and-throat-doctor to the stars, slipped it to one of his patients, a studio executive who called Walter Dr. God because he had repaired his cocaine-addled sinuses. That’s when I learned the expression, Only in Hollywood.

Alan’s screenplay was an off-the-wall comedy. As I mentioned, Alan was a laugh riot in those days. He did five rewrites, Chevy Chase was set to star (remember Chevy Chase?), and I told the school that I wouldn’t be back in the fall. We put a down payment on our house in the slums of Beverly Hills—90211 instead of 90210—and took off for Europe. Alan and I were madly in love with Paris and Rome and with each other. (I’ll never forget the garlic-kissed bouillabaisse in Marseilles and the saffron-scented osso buco in Milan. The blood sausage in Munich I could do without. In fact, after touring Dachau, I could do without the Germans.) It was the most romantic three weeks of our marriage and I came home pregnant.

It takes about as long to make a movie once the studio green-lights it, as it does to make a baby once the sperm green-lights the egg. (Or does the egg green-light the sperm?) Lisa was born opening weekend and mother and baby did fine. The movie, however, was stillborn. It wasn’t Alan’s fault. The first day on the set, Chevy Chase clashed with the director and walked. The director replaced him with a Tv sitcom star who popped uppers and chewed the scenery. As for the leading lady, her only talent was—Alan’s words, not mine—chewing the director. The effect of a turkey on Alan’s fledgling screenwriting career was worse than if he had never sold his first script. Get this: Not only wouldn’t the studio executive who bought it take Alan’s phone calls, but he switched from Alan’s father to another ear-nose-and-throat-doctor.

I returned to teaching at Flaky High so that we had an income while Alan started over again. We hired Juanita, a non-English-speaking Guatemalan housekeeper, to take care of Lisa while Alan wrote in our bedroom and I taught school. When Lisa took her nap, Juanita did the cleaning and the laundry and lost Alan’s socks.

Alan got a couple of nibbles over the next few years: a screenplay that was optioned but never purchased; a movie that was purchased but never shot; and he wrote several episodes for TV sitcoms. (Remember Punky Brewster?) There were many more screenplays and series pilots, however, that got away. And then there were the Writers Guild strikes that lasted six months at a time, during which Alan wasn’t allowed to write for pay even if a producer dangled a Rolls in front of him.

To add to our familial stress, Lisa was beginning to show signs of spoiled single child syndrome. Her mantra was, I want, therefore I deserve. Plus I began having erratic periods and my ob-gyn warned me that I was running out of eggs. Alan and I didn’t want Lisa to be an only child so I subjected myself to a barrage of fertility drugs. Instead of one baby we got two. With an eight-year-old in my lap and one twin per breast, I embraced full-time motherhood and Alan was forced to find a real job. He ended up as the managing editor of Beverly Hills Today, a free weekly that is tossed on peoples’ driveways and is usually knocked into the gutter by their gardeners’ leaf blowers. Alan considered it a waste of his talent to write about fundraisers,

Jaguar fender-benders, and the occasional Rodeo Drive robbery for a local rag, but it beat unemployment.

Ten years later, when Lisa left for UC Berkeley and Jake and Emma started junior high school, Alan suggested that I return to teaching. With one college tuition down and two more to go, we needed the money. But there was no way I was walking back into a classroom full of self-absorbed adolescents when I was dealing with three of my own. Alan was interviewing Twiggy for an article about Sixties has-beens (remember Twiggy?) and the waif-like former model/actress confessed her dream to him: What I’d really like to do is write a cookbook for women who want to be as skinny as I am. The only problem was that she couldn’t cook. Alan suggested that I help her.

Who knew that all those years as a stuck-at-home mom prepared me to help Twiggy accomplish her goal? But if you think about it, it makes sense: A With cookbook author is someone who enables the author to get the By credit. When it comes to enablers, I rule. While Lisa earned a By credit as a mouse in The Nutcracker, I earned the With credit by making her tail. Jake earned a By credit in soccer, baseball, and basketball. Guess who was the With who drove him to practice? Or who enabled his twin sister to earn a By credit in helping abused coyotes at a shelter in Azusa? And let’s not forget: I Withed Alan while he earned a By credit in...well.. .work. So that Alan could earn a living, I cooked, cleaned (with help, three hours a week, from Juanita-the-sock-hider), paid the bills, took care of the kids—even shopped for his clothes. To this day, Alan believes that new socks and underwear appear in his drawer by magic.

Of course, to be a With cookbook author, you must be a culinary commando, which I am. Other women complain that it’s too much work to throw a dinner party, they’d rather go to a restaurant. Not me. Even when the kids were little, I entertained family and friends at the old farmhouse table I picked up for $125 at the Rose Bowl Flea Market and brought home tied to the roof of my Volvo. What else was I to do with all the recipes that popped into my head at the strangest moments? (The penne with fresh and sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, and capers that came to me while watching The Godfather with Alan was one thing, but the cookies* with little chunks of Butterfinger that took over my brain when I was making love with him was another).

Okay, so I am obsessed with recipes. Maybe it’s because of what my Grandma Estelle used to say: If you’re good at it, cooking is a sure way to get compliments. My mother was never big on compliments, so I’ve always been starved.

But Withing cookbooks as a profession is no piece of cake. For starters, because food is always in your face, it’s hard not to put it in your mouth. When I first started Withing cookbooks, I had enough self-discipline to maintain a reasonably good figure—for a mother of three. To burn calories, I jogged a mile a day around the Beverly Hills High School track. Until my Beverly Hills doctor told me that I was jogging my way into knee-replacement surgery. My only exercise now is walking our dog Oscar, a generic brown-and-white mutt that Emma rescued from the pound and promised to walk herself. When Oscar was a puppy, he got so excited when I clipped on his leash and opened the door, that he took off like a greyhound out of the chute. I worked up a sweat keeping up with him. Now when I snap on Oscar’s leash, he plops down and starts licking his balls. I drag him outside, he does his business, walk over.

The last time I went to Macy’s to buy new socks for Alan, I spotted a rust-hued Ralph Lauren pantsuit that I thought might bring out the (hidden) auburn highlights of my bottle-brown hair. I would never buy Ralph Lauren—or any item of clothing—for full price, of course, but the outfit was marked down from $250 to $149.95. Unfortunately, when I tried it on in my usual size eight, I couldn’t zip up the trousers. So I took the escalator down to the house wares department and, for $145.95, I bought a five-quart Calphalon commercial anodized sauté pan with a stay-cool stainless steel handle marked down from $259.95. Now we’re talking a bargain.

Another downside of helping people write cookbooks is that you don’t make the big bucks. My fantasy is to write my own cookbook, one for which Miriam Epstein Levy gets the By credit in big letters on the cover. One that I get to autograph with Let’s Eat! on the title page. But since I am not a celebrity chef, a celebrity, or, God knows, a sexy starlet, I need an angle to make my cookbook stand out among the thousands cluttering the shelves at Barnes and Noble. And I need the time to write it. For years, I’ve blamed my lack of time on the fact that I am raising three children. In one month, though, Jake and Emma will be leaving for college.

My gut clenches: Is it only a month before my kids are gone?

TWO

Lucky dog!" Jake is staring out the kitchen window at Kimberly. The starlet’s white shitzu is all over her—pawing her breasts, licking her face—as she climbs into her Mercedes.

Every time Kimberly leaves, I feel older and dumpier. I scrape the low-fat cheesecake into the garbage can.

You’re not old! Jake playfully throws his arm around my shoulders. It isn’t quite a hug, but I’m grateful for any physical affection from Jake. My Aunt Ruthie, who has three boys, warned me: "Once your sons start hugging girls, they stop hugging you."

My daughters have accused me of being easier on Jake than I am on them because he’s my only son. Perhaps there’s truth to that, but I did not raise Jake as a prince, as my mother did with my brother Denny. If I lay off Jake more than my girls, maybe it’s because though Jake has my brown eyes and mercifully small nose, when I look at him I do not see who I once was, as I do when I look at Lisa and Emma. And unlike my girls, Jake does not count the ways that he is not like his mother.

I hear the rattle of my old Volvo and glance out the window to see Emma pulling into the driveway. She climbs out of the car and storms into the kitchen. Thanks a lot, Jake! She lobs the car keys at him.

He catches them on the fly. For what?

For leaving me the car with no gas in it!

If Jake is my most laid-back child, Emma is my most eccentric. A lime-green streak dominates her short brown hair and tiny rectangular glasses magnify her hazel eyes. Multicolored stud earrings march up the rim of Emma’s left ear, while on her right ear lobe she makes a statement with one oversized gold-hoop earring. Her glittery purple fingernail polish would make more of a statement if she didn’t chew her fingernails, but I know that if I suggest it she will chew them more.

As on most days when Emma teaches art to inner-city kids, she is concealing her Rubenesque body under loose-fitting overalls. Emma is a quasi-vegetarian; she doesn’t eat what she considers cute animals or animals that fly. She admits that cows don’t fall into either category, but she won’t eat beef either. As picky as she is about what passes her lips, though, Emma never counts calories. In a city where half the teenage girls are anorexic, she likes to say, it’s an act of rebellion.

There was gas in the car. Jake is picking on the good cheesecake.

Then how come I barely made it to the gas station? Emma flicks on the mini TV on the kitchen counter. As always, it is tuned to the Food Channel. Wolfgang Puck is duking it out with Chef Morimoto on Iron Chef. Jake switches to MTV. Hey, I was watching! barks Emma.

My twins started bickering in the womb. When I was in labor—I was into my 18th agonizing hour when the ob-gyn mercifully stuck what looked like one of my mother’s knitting needles up me and broke the waters—it felt as there were a WWF match going on inside of me. I pictured the two babies trying to elbow each other out of the way in a contest to see who would be the first one out. Emma won by a head and Jake has been trying to one-up her ever since.

The phone rings. Emma grabs it, but Jake wrenches it away. Yo! He listens. Sorry, Em’s not home.

Emma tears the receiver from his hand. I am too! When she realizes it’s not for her, her face falls. Oh hi. She shoots Jake a dirty look and holds out the phone to me. Kate.

My best friend since Mills College, Kate usually calls after she closes her florist shop in Santa Barbara for the day and goes home to her red-wood-and-glass house overlooking the ocean. Whenever Kate phones, I picture her sitting on her deck, watching the sunset turn the Pacific as orange as the label on a bottle of Veuve Clicquot (Kate’s favorite) while she sips Jack Daniels (another Kate favorite). It isn’t like her to phone so early in the day.

Put her on speakerphone, I say from the sink, where I’m scrubbing the cheesecake pans. Emma punches the speakerphone button. Hope you don’t mind the squawk box, I call. I’m doing dishes.

Jake sticks his face up to the speakerphone mike. How’s this for a plan, Kate? After Em and I split for college next month, you move in.

Kate laughs that big laugh that comes so easily to her. How ‘bout y’all get lost? Whenever Kate is tense, she starts sounding like Texas, where she grew up and lived most of her life. I need to talk to your mama.

Ignoring her, Jake flops down on the floor next to the cage that holds Fifi IV, the last remaining guinea pig from the litters he bred when he was in junior high school. Jake made over $50 by selling the baby guinea pigs to Petco until Emma put an end to it: You think people buy them as pets for their kids? she gasped. "They feed them to their pet boa constrictors!"

Jake scratches the raggedy-looking rodent—it looks like a walking toupee—through the bars of the cage. Emma is watching Iron Chef and picking on the cheesecake. Please, children, I say, with an emphasis on the children I want to talk to Kate. Neither Jake nor Kate budge.

Jake, go to your room! Kate shouts over the speakerphone. You too, Emma! I know that harpy tone of Kate’s. It’s the same one she used to scare away butt-grabbing creeps in Italy the summer we toured Europe after college.

Rolling her eyes, Emma kills the TV, gives Jake a hand up, and yanks him out of the kitchen into the family room. He kicks the swinging door closed behind them.

Speak to me, I call towards the speakerphone.

He wrote me a letter, says Kate.

Who?

Swiss Cheese!

Jake shoves his way through the swinging door. "Swiss Cheese is writing her letters?"

Out!

C’mon, if it wasn’t for me, Kate wouldn’t know the dude was alive!

Last month, Kate drove down to L.A. from Santa Barbara for the weekend. Since Kate’s birthday is two weeks before mine, we decided to put ourselves out of our misery together. We were turning—could it possibly be true?—49. "I guess