Free The Tao of Martha by Jen Lancaster

aquiet dinner featuring a filet with goat cheese and a balsamic vinegar reduction, followed by cake and the opportunity to catch up on a month of TiVo’ed fall television premieres.
    Small dreams, people. Small dreams.
    Fletch was in charge of dinner, which, coincidentally, you don’t have to be Martha to prepare. The filet requires a salt, pepper, and garlic rubdown, but the trick is to warm the meat to ninety-five degrees in the oven before pan-searing it. Doing so dries off the outside, which means the entire inside stays pink, yet allows the perimeter to form the most gorgeous char crust.
    (Wait, I learned this trick from watching Martha. Oh, well.)
    While the filet rests under a tent of tinfoil, top with a layer of goat cheese, which should be crisped until it’s golden. I normally pop the whole thing under the broiler for thirty seconds, or I use my little crème brûlée torch if I’ve remembered to refill the butane. Goes without saying, of course, that I almost never remember to refill the butane. But, really, who keeps excess butane on hand? What am I, a welder?
    (Related note? Fletch wanted to buy a full-size blowtorch for our future brûlées, but as I don’t want to see our home reduced to a pile of smoking rubble, I put down my foot on this one.)
    Anyway, back to my First Choice in Last Suppers—so, goat cheese on a filet is fine, but the step that turns the meal into magic is the balsamic vinegar reduction. The sweetness of the sauce contrasted with the creamy sourness of the cheese is nothing short of transcendent. Plus, the sauce is so easy to make, a helper monkey could do it.
    I take four parts of high-quality balsamic and mix it with one part sugar. Placing the mix in a saucepan on low, I cook it down for twenty to thirty minutes. The key is constant whisking as it reduces, which would be especially easy for a monkey, as he could also stir with his tail.
    Once the sauce is thick and syrupy, the bittersweet tang is the perfect complement for anything from roasted vegetables to ice cream.
    Most recipes don’t mention this, but it’s important to understand the downside of making this miraculous elixir: reducing vinegar makes your house smell like feet.
    For a week.
    Also, without constant whisking, the sauce will overcook and then your house will smell like burned feet.
    For a week.
    Martha would say that this is the opposite of a good thing, particularly because that stench gets in the walls.
    As Fletch cooked that fateful November day, I wandered in and out of the kitchen, one wary eye on the reduction. He promised me he was on top of it and continued to shoo me away.
    I was down the hall watching something Real Housewife –based when I caught a whiff of the familiar trace of burned vinegar foot. In the time it took Fletch to pick out the wine, the sauce overheated and was ruined.
    As we sat down to my unsauced steak, I felt an unbearable, yet completely unwarranted sense of sadness. My issue wasn’t the dinner. Fletch tried, and I love him for making the effort.
    Rather, there’s something about finishing a book that leaves me feeling depressed. You’d think I’d be all celebratory and overjoyed to have the deadline off my back, but that’s never the case. When I turn in my manuscript, the absence of having that pressure feels like a loss. That’s why when people complete a marathon, they run past the finish line. The human body can’t handle the drop from one hundred to zero. For me, it’s always jarring to go from that which consumes my life to nothing with the sending of one e-mail attachment. Without a mental cooldown period, I’m left feeling like I have the worst case of PMS ever.
    And it’s because of this that I started to cry while eating my stupid balsamic-free filet.
    “Are you okay?” Fletch asked, voice full of concern.
    “I’m fine,” I promised, sniffling into my napkin.
    “Clearly you aren’t.”
    “I just…I just…I just wanted my balsamic. That’s all I