Now You’re Cooking!

Last week I was invited to attend a special cooking event with Dave Lieberman, who is also one of People’s 50 Hottest Bachelors and is known, among people with eyes, as the Culinary Cutie. The event was sponsored by Del Monte and Dave was going to show us how to cook with Del Monte products and look absolutely adorable. I was so there.

Photo by Bobby Marro Photography. Because I left my camera at home.

I get to the event and it’s the typical thing– everyone is already best friends with everyone else there and are chatting merrily to each other and I am standing there clutching my glass of wine with both hands and am trying to fashion my facial expression into a calm “I feel completely comfortable standing here all by myself and it never occurred to me that everyone else is talking about me and laughing.” And while I’m posing, I sort of survey the room, and I immediately locate Dave Lieberman, because believe me, there were not too many other contenders for the Culinary Cutie title there.

And then this angel from heaven approaches me and starts to chat. “Hi,” she says, smiling at me, “Can you fill me in on this thing, I just got invited a few hours ago.”
And I, feeling totally expert, start to share my wisdom.
“Well, at three o’clock,” I begin.
And she says, “Three?” Because by this time it’s after 7.
“Yes, three,” I say. Clearly, I am dealing with an amateur. An amateur who is very lucky to have found me. “Like twelve o’clock is straight ahead, and three o’clock is to the right,” I motion with my eyelash to the location of the Culinary Cutie. “So, at three o’clock is Dave. Dave is a chef.”
I keep enlightening her until stops me to say that she knows who Dave is because she is his publicist. Alrighty! But she was lovely and fun and if I hadn’t been in an already committed publicist-publicee relationship, I totally would have snatched her up.

And then Dave cooked some stuff, like a spinach dip, which consisted of opening a can of spinach and a vat of room temperature cream cheese and some chives or something. It may have had other ingredients, too, but personally, I lost consciousness when I heard “spinach in a can”. When I came to, I was admiring delicious looking pinkish cupcakes, which for some reason were positioned dangerously close to a can of beets. “Hey, do these cupcakes have beets in them?” I asked the Culinary Cutie. And he said that they sure do and offered me one. So, here’s the thing. It was delicious. But it had beets. As an American citizen, I’m sure that you could see my dilemma.
“So, how much sugar do you need to use to kill the taste of the beets?” I asked.
“Beets are naturally sweet, you know,” the Culinary Cutie said. “And by the way, I love you.” That may not be a direct quote.

You remember that the photos are by Bobby Marro Photography, right?

Full disclosure! I got a copy of Dave’s recipe book, The 10 Things You Need to Eat, which is coming out in January. I meant to tell his publicist that it would probably be better if it came out in December, in time for the holiday season, but I didn’t want to intimidate her with my Mad Marketing Skillz.

I’m enjoying the book, except I think that I got a defective copy of the book because it doesn’t list Haagen Dasz as one of the 10 things that I need to eat. But maybe it’s implied? I mean, it also doesn’t say that I need to breathe in oxygen, but I’m totally doing that.
You have to take these books with a grain of salt, you know.

One year ago ...

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