Simmer Down

in charge of Uncle Alan’s estate, and this lawyer apparently had time to do things other than send e-mails to friends making up stories about his exes. His message was an unamusing lecture reminding me yet again that the credit card I had been given was strictly for the purpose of buying myself school-related items. He remained irrationally convinced that Williams-Sonoma, Gap, and J. Crew sold nothing related to social work.
    The next message was from Sean. “Chloe, I really need to see you. It’s important. Can you call me back as soon as you get this?” I jotted down his number on the back of a gas bill and sighed. Clearly, Sean had seen me and was bowled over by an intense desire to reunite with his past love. Did I really want to call him back? I decided to start dinner and mull over the question.
    I opened the fridge to see what I could throw together and had to fish through a whole mess of other food to find what I wanted. Josh had stocked my fridge with what seemed like hundreds of free samples of food he’d been given by purveyors. When restaurants need food, they don’t go to supermarkets; rather, they get deliveries from meat, fish, vegetable, dry goods, and alcohol companies, among others. And even when a restaurant was all set up with its purveyors, representatives from rival companies stopped in periodically to try to win the restaurant’s business by dropping off packaged samples of products. Some samples were ordinary things like chicken breasts and sirloin steaks, but others were fancy cuts of meat and various high-end products that Josh didn’t need. I now had ten individual-sized packets of gourmet pasta, including one of black-and-white-striped ravioli stuffed with lobster, and another of Gorgonzola and roasted red pepper tortellini; two sealed bags of ground lamb; a Cornish hen; venison sausage; a package of pork chops; and an unidentifiable duck part. When Josh gave me samples, I usually threw them into the freezer, which was now crowded with them. Once I’d sorted everything out, I happily realized that I had all the ingredients for one of my favorite winter dishes.
    I started to assemble ingredients: kielbasa, onions, garlic, white beans, canned tomatoes, kale, chicken broth, and a variety of dried herbs from the spice rack. “That Kielbasa Thing,” as I ineloquently referred to it, was a thick, delicious, hearty, comforting stew. It was not named something like Kielbasa Surprise, because I avoid cooking or eating anything called a festival, a carnival, a medley, a party, or, especially, a surprise. In my experience, Pasta Surprise all too often means Surprise! There are jelly beans in your macaroni! Furthermore, festivals, carnivals, surprises, and such reminded me of the disaster known as Recipes and Memories of the Carter Family , which was a nightmare collection of supposedly touching stories and secret recipes gathered by some distant relative of my father’s. My parents, Heather, and I had each felt obliged to fork over twenty-five dollars for the small three-ring binder that contained mysteries of the Carter clan. When the book arrived, I opened the binder and immediately found a hint of problems to come. Paper-clipped to the title page was a small sheet with the heading, “Errors Discovered After Cookbook Returned from Publisher.” When making the King Ranch Chicken, I should not use ½ cup of chili powder, but 1 teaspoon. The Popcorn Cake recipe required an angel food cake pan and not an angle food pan. The Bundt Cake Supreme-O needed ¾ cup water, not the “ ¾ bunches of water” called for in the book. When I made Outdoor Cooking Banana Boats, I was not to be confused by the phrase “with o cutting,” which should be read as “without cutting.” Whew!
    The book included the following gastronomic calamities: Magic Marshmallow Crescent Puffs, Centipede Surprise, Pretzel Salad, Dishpan Cookies, and Old-Timer’s Soggy Cherry Cake. Million Dollar Salad was made from canned cherry pie filling, canned crushed pineapple, Cool Whip, condensed milk, and, anomalously, a fresh ingredient, namely, bananas. When I bravely showed Josh the cookbook, he was admirably tactful. His only comment was that Fritos did not belong in a cheesecake.
    A chapter devoted to cooking tips and household hints advised the reader to dress up buttered, cooked vegetables with canned French-fried onions and never to use soda to keep vegetables green because it destroys vitamin C. I learned that