Teaching Dave: New city, challenge for couple

The project: To teach my boyfriend, Dave, who thinks hot sauce is its own food group, the basics of fine cooking in one month.

The final exam: Dave must cook a four-course dinner for his family at the end of the month. His parents are health-conscious physicians from New Jersey. His mother doesn't eat red meat, and one sister is a pescetarian, eating fish but not meat.

The real challenge: Not only have we moved in together for the first time, we've moved from New York to San Francisco and started new jobs, he at a tech startup, me in food media. Now we're living in a half-furnished loft-style apartment with no bedroom doors. According to the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, our stress levels have both hovered around 331 for the past four weeks. To put 331 into perspective, it's like we've each died. One-and-a-half times.

Dave has been my food-taster as I've navigated the road from culinary student to professional cook to food writer.

At the French Culinary Institute in New York, I donned my commis hat and made esoteric French dishes like galantine in aspic - think a cold, medieval-style turducken. Dave patiently ate his way through "potato week," wiping his plate clean with his finger (a pet peeve of mine).

After a brief carrot-peeling stint at Jean Georges, I worked two stations on the hot line at Gramercy Tavern, churning out plates of lamb ragu and silky smooth soups during one of the city's busiest lunch services. Dave stroked my head when, sweating and gasping, a recurring nightmare jolted me awake in the middle of the night: The sous chef would be screaming at me to move a pan off of the burner, but the pan would have no handles. ("My risotto! It's burning!")

When I left the thrills of the kitchen for the comfort of the desk chair, writing about affordable home-cooking for the Atlantic Monthly, he rushed home from work to partake in dinners, picking up an extra garlic bulb or lemon on the way.

Yet, after all this, his culinary repertoire was limited to fried eggs and meatballs.

He was game when I suggested the project, though he refused to do inane knife work like carving potatoes into cocottes, a seven-sided barrel shape pleasing to French cooks for no discernible reason, and demanded that we eat food he likes. I dismissed visions of chicken wings flying through my head, and agreed.

Week One: In which our boxes have not yet arrived

The only tools you really need to cook a simple dinner are a sharp chef's knife, a heavy pot (I like enameled cast iron, which distributes heat evenly and is easy to clean) or a stock pot (for pasta or blanching vegetables), a wooden spoon, and a cutting board. If you have the luxury of a few more tools, a paring knife, a peeler and some tongs will do you well. And if you want to professionalize your kitchen, I've never met a chef who didn't swear by the Vita-Prep, a powerful blender.

But, our boxes somewhere in a warehouse in Kansas, we worked with what we had: a chef's knife, a pot and a cutting board. Oh, and a wok. A really poorly made wok from Ikea, Dave's impulse buy at the register.

For our first weeknight dinner, per his request, we made a spicy beef and vegetable stir-fry. It's quick, simple, requires knife work, and stresses the importance of two key basics: making uniform cuts so that each vegetable is approximately the same size, ensuring even cooking; and heat control.

I curved his fingers under to ward against sliced fingers as he chopped, but every time I turned away, his left fingers sprung back into sticks.

The kitchen, though much larger than my own in New York, felt cramped. He was always in the wrong place. We both reached for the knife at the same time, and moments later, I turned around quickly and our heads knocked. "Say 'behind'!" I snapped.

Wisdom of Julia Child