Eating With the Angels Read Online Free

loved that flawless French food so much he took against it and all other things even slightly ooh-là-là.
    ‘Top-up?’ Ashlee smiled, her face a symphony of sympathy as she offered me more Moët. I couldn’t decide whether to smile and nod or whether to smash the glass on the armrest and shove it into her neck scarf, but in the end I went with the smiling and nodding.
    ‘Fabulous,’ I said as I raised my glass at her then turned to the window to hide my mortification. The ridiculously puffy clouds were doing their best to disguise the distance that grew between me and my husband but with every breath I took I felt the miles stretch further and further.
    How did I get here? That’s what I kept asking myself as I swatted away the awful peanut-free freeze-dried whatever-they-aresthat Ashlee insisted on offering, that great hopeful diamond of hers winking meanly at me. Where did it all go wrong?
    We had been growing apart these past few years, I could see that from 35,000 feet. The whole solo honeymoon whoopsie perhaps shouldn’t have come as quite such a surprise.
    We came at everything from different angles, Tom and I, even food, which we both adored and around which we had developed our jobs, our lives. I loved to eat and he loved to cook — you would think this would be the perfect combination and in some respects it was but in others we were on opposite sides of the soup pot. After the dump-truck incident at kindergarten, for instance, so soon after that he still had snot running into his mouth and tears flowing down his cheeks, I remember being genuinely surprised at his distress. Ignore the whole Play-Doh part of the scenario and what reason was there to make a cake but have people eat it? It looked so good — pink with yellow frosting — what else was he going to do with it?
    When we were at high school we compared our homemade sandwiches with great interest; the difference being that even if I didn’t like something, I would still eat it whereas Tom simply could not stomach even a simple tomato sandwich on white bread if it was under-salted or over-peppered or slightly soggy. As for peanut butter and jelly — forget about it. That was for the riff-raff and he was certainly not riff-raff. I liked that about him then. I liked that he knew what he wanted and nothing else would do. He couldn’t care less about hanging out with other teenagers, shooting hoops or smoking cigarettes or doing whatever else was considered hip. Instead, we spent our afternoons on eating adventures, happily schlepping up to Papaya King for hot dogs or down to Katz’s for pastrami or over to 6th Street in the East Village for dhosas.
    Tom opened my taste buds, really. He changed my world. Before him, food was something I had to choke down without retching (Play-Doh gâteau, for example) or throw in the garbage without my mother seeing me.
    Mom was, and still is, the world’s most awful cook. I know that sounds uncharitable but seriously that’s just about the nicest way I can put it. Her taste is all in her — actually, I don’t know where her taste is but it is not in her mouth. Or her nose. You only have to walk into her apartment and smell the slightly past-its-prime chicken breast marinating in sake and acidophilus yoghurt to get an inkling of this. And unlike other awful cooks, who usually buy their meals ready-made or leave the cooking to someone else, my mother has boundless, truly boundless, enthusiasm in the kitchen and absolutely no idea how unpalatable her heinous concoctions really are. Without a shadow of a doubt she is taste-blind, completely and utterly.
    Mind you, I think that my father should shoulder some of the blame. He has an iron constitution. I’ve never even seen him hesitate, let alone retch, the way my brother Emmet and I used to before our tender juvenile stomach linings hardened up and stopped resisting things that were slightly off, a funny colour, indescribably seasoned, or hopelessly mis-matched with