If I Did It

For my husband and myself, the ingredients for a perfect dinner are as follows: two porterhouse steaks, juicy and bloody; that bottle of Fontalloro from our trip to Italy, which we’ve been saving for seven years; a secluded cabin somewhere off the grid; a little Sarah Vaughn playing in the background; a fireplace that we can get naked in front of; and—you guessed it—NO kids.

This is, of course, all hypothetical—our two small children, busy schedules, and shrinking wallets have so far guaranteed that. But Dave and I think about it—a lot. In our deliciously imaginative minds, there have been long weekends in Paris, where we eat and drink our way from our comfortable room at Hotel D’Aubusson near Pont Neuf, to a wonderful, tiny bistro called Le Hangar on Impasse Berthaud. Or we fly to Singapore, eat at the hawker stands in between shopping excursions during the day, and then spend our nights at the Raffles Hotel, where we drink cocktails with our pinkies extended. Or maybe we just drive up Pacific Highway One, head to Big Sur, hang out in a yurt at the Treebones Resort, and inhale the magnificent ocean air while the stars gaze down on us.

You see, a perfect dinner, for us, is not just about the meal. It’s about getting out of our ordinary mindset and floating down some make-believe river that doesn’t have anything to do with the worries or troubles in our everyday lives. So, if I did plan the perfect dinner for the two of us, it would happen in some place other than our current surroundings, and it would last for at least three days. There would be some grand occasion connected with it—let’s say his fortieth birthday, or our tenth wedding anniversary, or maybe the day we both quit our respective jobs because one of us brought home the winning lottery ticket. 

Okay, so let’s pretend it’s our retirement dinner (at the ripe old age of thirty-six) and we are spending the weekend at a cabin in the Adirondacks. After leaving the kids at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house for the weekend, Dave and I drive five hours up I-87 to our imaginary cabin. In the back seat of our car, we have the ingredients for our meal: two huge porterhouse steaks, shallots, garlic, haricots verts, vine-ripened tomatoes, cilantro, two loaves of freshly-baked ciabatta bread, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, a hunk of Locatelli Romano cheese, that bottle of Fontalloro, and a couple more bottles of pinot noir. 

When we arrive at the cabin, I start the grill and prepare the steaks. Since porterhouse is a very flavorful (and fatty) steak, it doesn’t need much: a little butter rubbed on it, some salt and pepper. While the grill is heating up, I wash the haricots verts, vine-ripened tomatoes, and cilantro.