Sarah Copeland - The Newlywed Cookbook: Fresh Ideas & Modern Recipes for Cooking with & for Each Other

For Andrs, my dream guy

Theres a moment in a marriage, whether two days or two hundred and twenty-two days into it, where youre standing side by side in the morning barefoot on the cool kitchen floor. Everything is quiet but the hum of him making you coffee just the way you like it, with all that frothy milk and sugar. Youre stirring together his favorite pancakes, sprinkling a few blueberries in the batter, and then it hits you: these simple moments are somehow the best in life.

This could happen over a fork fight for the last peach in the jar, or playing rock-paper-scissors for whose turn it is to do dishes. It can happen, and will happen over and over again if you let it. That is the essence of this book.

Fresh food, prepared with love, is a key ingredient to happy, healthful, and playful relationships. Its much easier to laugh through a disagreement when your bellies are full of delicious, nurturing food {believe me, Ive softened an argument more than once with a bowl of something sweet} and its easier to continue loving a person through their faults when thats the same person you get down-and-dirty with in the garden and at the kitchen sink, wiping up the pots and pans of a feast youll remember. Its hard not to love the person who just spent their evening making chocolate pudding from scratch or who missed an hour of extra sleep to have a fat stack of pancakes waiting for you on Saturday morning when you wake up.

This book is all about how sweet life can be when the kitchen is your playground. Its a book as much about good living as it is about good eating. Its a book about the story of your life together.

The part of my story that became the inspiration for this book began in Hungary, with Andrs, my best friend and playmate in life. It was my second trip to Hungary with him, and I had already fallen in love with his family, his culture, and the foods that grew all over the backyard of the house where he grew upparsnips and carrots, wild strawberries, plump plums, and sour cherries that his mother turned into mouth-puckering soup. Food became the only form of communication I had with his family. I learned about the devotion of his mother while standing grating home-grown potatoes at her side for rsti. I learned about the passion and peace of his father, walking with him among the fruit trees, learning the words of our favorite foods.

On the third day of that trip, Andrs took me on a hike up into the Bakony hills behind the farmhouse where hed spent his summers as a kid. We hiked to the top of the peak where all you could see for miles was forest, fields, and his little village. On the hike back down, as the forest swallowed us in a sea of ferns, Andrs stopped, got down on his knees, and asked me to be his wife.

It wasnt all romance. I had been a grump the whole way, hungry and fidgety, wishing Id worn something cuter every time he snapped a photo. But Andrs, steadfast, was smiling the whole way, confident in his plan. And, true to form, just minutes after he pulled the ring out of his pocket, he held out a handful of fruit and asked, Do you want a fig? as if he was thinking Phew, she said yes, now we eat. I wanted time to stop, to make a screen grab of this moment, to hold his gaze. And he wanted to eat. I had to laughwe really are different creatures, and that is why life is so good together.

And so goes our story. He makes me laugh, and then we eat. And eat we did. We celebrated over many meals that week. Before we left, his grandmother spent a whole day teaching me how to roll her homemade strudel, as if it were now in my hands to provide his favorite foods, to nurture and restore him through the loving act of cooking.

At the airport when we left Hungary, knowing they wouldnt see us again until the wedding, his family looked at him first, then me, and spoke a few simple words. Andrs translated: Take good care of each other, they said. Its the most important thing.

On the plane home, as I got used to the glimmer on my finger and thought about what it meant, I played those words over and over again in my head. Suddenly I heard my granddad and saw him reaching over to grab my dads arm as he said goodbye to my own parents on their visits back home, Take good care of each other now. I had heard him say it a dozen times. Sitting next to the man who would become my husband, I suddenly realized that those simple words were at the heart of every marriage we admired. It seemed that the secret to a rich life together was to make it our pride and joy to take good care of each other.

Cooking together and for each other is a loving act, one of the most enduring ways to nurture each other, and your first opportunity to invest in each others health and happiness. Food is a love language, one most of us speak. This book is here to add a few more words to your vocabulary. It is a place to turn to for new ideas and inspiration to put down the take-out menu and cook up something all your own.

I can never understand how young couples starting off buy a television, or a sofa, or a bed.

Dont they know the table comes first?Fergus Henderson

Long before we ever ate those figs together in a forest, or took our first toast as husband and wife, Andrs sat at my table in my apartment in New York City eating baba ghanoush and homemade crackers. How he got there is another story for another day, but you could say that in our life, the table always came first. Our first meal together set the tone for everything that was to come. How much he must have trusted me, to eat whatever I put in front of him without giving it a second thought, and how much I trusted him to have him sit with me there at my own table while I shared the most personal of gifts with himmy cooking.

Between that first meal and the grand meal that eventually followed {the wedding supper}, I fed and nurtured his body with food, while he nurtured my dreams, my decisions, and my hopes. And despite the state of his buckwheat pancakes {got to love the guy for trying}, I realized I utterly loved him.

When we got married, and made our home together, the table became an even bigger part of our lives. In our case, the table is the kitchen counter that sits smack in the middle of our apartment. It is our bar, our desk, my potting shed, and his workshopthe epicenter of our life together. We start our days there over breakfast and end them there too {usually with something sweet}. We host brunches and pizza parties and pasta-making feasts, plan our budgets, and dream up our plans for the future over simple meals that all start right there. The table is our foundation, the magnetic core of our life together.

As a newlywed, you too are building your life with the one you love. With this book, I hope to help you build it around a table strong enough to hold a lifetime of tradition, good humor, and good meals with the people you love the most. Dont worry if that first table you share is physically tiny; I know firsthand that the size of the table doesnt matter. One day your table will grow to fit more friends and family, but it all starts with just the two of you across from each other in those first amazing years after you say I do.

ITS YOUR LIFE: This book is full of the kinds of stories, recipes, and adventures that have made my marriage my greatest haven, the place Im the happiest, the most at home and alive. But this is your book now, and your marriage. Make these recipes your own, write your own stories, and make every day an occasion for a delicious, satisfying life together.

There are dozens of rules to good cooking. Ive probably broken most of them. I snip chives with kitchen shears when Im in a hurry and rarely chop anything in perfect dice. Forget the rulescooking is supposed to be fun! Here are ten strategies to make your kitchen the spirited and well-seasoned center of your nest.