2PM, Saturday



See all these groceries? This is what $400 buys you at a charity auction. Well, that and the services of an amateur chef who's willing to walk into your home and whip up dinner for eight.

I'm Anthony, and last January my mom had me auctioned off with a $200 gift certificate to Italian grocery/deli G.B. Russo's for charity. I think I brought in nearly $400, which really pleased the charity people, but left me on the hook to cook for someone other than my family for the first time since my restaurant days. My family has always said I was talented in the kitchen, but I've got no ego about this stuff. In fact, they could have been blowing smoke all these years about how good my dinners turn out, but I guess if my mom's got confidence I can make a dinner party for eight people and not screw anything up, then I'll give it a shot. I mean, I can do this, right?



This is me (on the left) and Joe Carmolli, a friend of mine who happens to teach culinary arts and does some catering on the side. Yes, I panicked. As soon as my mom told me the auction was official, I called Joe and begged for help. Looping in a talented chef was necessary, that he was also Italian was a bonus.

Joe's main contribution was supposed to be on the organizational side. Take a look back at that picture of the kitchen island flush with groceries. Do me a quick favor and count the bags of green beans. Three huge bags, right? This is what happens when I'm left to my own devices. Joe and I did the pre-game shopping the week before the dinner at Russo's, picking up the dry goods, cheeses, and cured meats for the meal. Were it not for Joe, I'm certain I would have ended up with at least one extra pound of Prosciutto di Parma (at $25/lb) and probably would have bought the store out of Gorgonzola. As it was, Joe worked to reel me in and make good use of the gift certificates at Russo's, and we came away with some good stuff.

Of course, when I was left on my own to go buy meat and vegetables, I come away with green beans for twenty-six. Joe just shook his head.

What You Eat, Before You Eat, To Make You More Hungry

I don't know if I would have agreed to cook for this dinner party if the gift certificates weren't from G.B. Russo's in Grand Rapids. Since I'm stuck in middle America, and am located at least three hours from a Trader Joe's or Whole Foods-type market, any sort of grocery store just would not do. It had to be Russo's.

If you're asking me why, you obviously haven't had Prosciutto di Parma side-by-side with the Midwest's own Boar's Head brand knock-off. Simply put, one is transcendent, the other is fatty ham. I drive the forty-five minutes about once a month to load up on canned tomatoes, buy the deli meats and cheeses I can't live without, and to spend $4 on a pound of pasta that's at least four times better than the Mueller's brand at ninety-nine cents a box.

In gambling, we have a different definition of "value." Any time you're faced with a choice to go one way or the other, when the reward on one side outweighs the difference in cost between the choices, you're finding value. Value is not about clipping coupons and making do with American-made pasta and Chicago's own fatty ham. It's about enjoying a meal that might cost me more in time, effort, and supplies that much more because the ingredients are that much better.

And that's Russo's. Real imported Prosciutto. Salami packed in salt, labeled in Italian, measured with metrics. It's about Parmagiano-Reggiano, which is as far from that freakish granulated shelf cheese called "Parmesan" as the price tag would indicate. It's about finding artisan pasta, forty or fifty olive oil choices, biscotti from Rome and a Brunello from Abruzzi.

Prosciutto should be the barometer of how good a market you've got in your home town. When you've got American-made Prosciutto it's fundamentally the same as having none at all. One imported choice is good, $25/lb stuff stamped "Parma" is even better. If your market's corporate wisdom has determined that expensive salted and cured meats aren't worth stocking, then you might want to re-evaluate your own lifestyle choices.

And yes, I'm an incorrigible addict.

In the menu planning meeting with the dinner party's hosts, I suggested a few different appetizer choices, but kept coming back to one key point - we should play to the strengths of what Russo's had to offer. So rather than fresh vegetables spun into bruschetta topping, we decided to go antipasta, with deli meats, cheeses, crackers, olives and peppers.



Turned out beautifully, thanks mostly to Joe. I mean, you can absolutely put me in charge of picking out what's going to be on the plate, but there's about a zero percent chance this stuff was going to look pretty if you left it up to me to plate it up. I've got no eye for it at all.



Look at that plate. From left to right (by memory, I could be wrong) you've got a wedge of Amish Gorgonzola (a last minute local grocery purchase by me, was mostly for the main course but we had some left over because I - surprise - overbought), a wedge of a red pepper goat cheese, a mushroom brie, and about the most spectacular imported Gorgonzola I've ever tasted. Tears-to-my-eyes good, just creamy and luscious and all that.

And yes, the credit for the leaves and grapes, not to mention all the other garnishes, goes to Joe. I'd have just slopped the cheeses on the plate and said "have at it," but he's a little more skilled in this end of things than I am.



He did let me have at it with the crackers, but admonished me pretty good when I didn't artfully fan the flatbread ones out at first. Rosemary is a lame garnish too, but the grapes would have been buried here.



There, in all her glory, goes the Prosciutto di Parma. Added to the greatest of the cured Italian meats is some pepperoncini, roasted garlic and roasted red pepper. Yes, I cleaned this plate off real good after the guests had gone in for dinner.



Not only is "gabbagool" a lot of fun to say, it's also ridiculously delicious. The non-Paisan of us call this "cappicola," which isn't nearly as entertaining coming out of your mouth. Going in though? A delight. Think soft salami, real hearty with enough fat on board to keep things smooth. We added garlic-stuffed olives and more roasted red pepper as garnish. Update: Joe reminded me that's not gabbagool, that's sopressetta. Still freaking tasty.



I forget the name of this salami, but I remember how it tasted. It was terrifically spicy, but sadly was largely ignored by the guests. Sad for them, I grazed on this plate for the rest of the night. We took some artichoke hearts and red pepper and plated them up here for good measure.



Now you see why I couldn't have done this without Joe? Look at how good that looks. I mean, you could throw a pile of Prosciutto this good in a dog dish and I wouldn't be able to keep my fingers clean, but most people like their $400 meal to both look and taste good. Go figure.



Lastly, the wine... We weren't responsible for that end of things ("Just spend on the food," they tell me. Okay.), so they asked their dinner guests to come up with some decent choices. Note two bottles of Rosso di Montalcino from the same vintner - Banfi, I think (both with burgundy-colored neck foil). The bottle on the left is the reserve, which is pretty solid, but the one on the right is a fairly terrific $12 bottle if memory serves. They weren't hurting for red wine at all here.

Caprese



I neglected to mention that our hosts had a liberal attitude towards our drinking that night. Well, that afternoon and that night. You're looking at four bottles here, but your assumption would be wrong. The two bottles on the right, a Pinot Grigio and the Spanish red were our cooking wines, while the two on the left were our drinkin' wines. The Woop Woop is an Australian Pinot, and we made short work of that one after finishing the Selciaia Rosso off.

Anyway, appetizers started the meal, we went back and forth in our thoughts for a salad before coming back to an old standby.



Yes, a full bowl of plum tomatoes, sliced. Again, reality escapes me, as I count on a full two tomatoes per guest, with a few extras chopped up "just in case."



Note the quantity of tomato on the plate is FOUR, not FOURTEEN. Again, I'm foiled by my own idiocy, leaving our hosts with more chopped tomatoes in their fridge than they'd know what to do with. This is funny, as the host does not like tomatoes in their natural state. Some sort of aversion to the pulpy insides I suppose.

To be fair, the first grocery store I went to that morning had the most ramshackle assortment of tomatoes I've ever seen, from which I was fortunate to find eight edible ones. I bought another twelve at another grocery on my way over.

"Just in case."

Plated with a Romaine leaf, seasoned with salt and pepper and drizzled with balsamic vinegar, that's your standard above-average fresh mozzarella plated up with the plum tomatoes. We went with cow's milk, despite the availability of buffalo milk mozzarella at Russo's. They actually taste the same, so the extra dollar we saved came in handy I'm sure. In the fancy restaurants they call this salad Caprese, and you end up paying $9 for what is fundamentally $2 worth of ingredients.

Especially when you're buying tomatoes in bulk.

Fungus Envy



Want to give me nightmares? Show me a bowl full of mushrooms soaking in liqueur. Liqueur not in the traditional get-you-drunk sense, but liqueur in the byproduct-of-soaking-fungus sort of way.

I can make risotto, I swear. I made a pretty nice one last week, as a matter of fact. But at the meeting where I helped the hosts decide on a menu, they brought up their trip to Italy (uh oh) and the wonderful wild mushroom risotto they had at one of the restaurants they visited (double uh oh).

I can't stand the smell of those things. I used to make homemade Cream of Mushroom by the steam well (a dozen gallons at a time) a long time ago, but since leaving the restaurant biz, I swore I'd never touch the damn things in the kitchen again.

Again, thank god for Joe.



Here's Joe chopping shallots, getting ready to put the risotto together. Notice the knife technique? They call this "planking" the shallot. That's when you take cuts horizontally up the side before you rock the knife vertically through the vegetable. Cuts down on the time it takes to dice just about anything. I have terrible knife technique, and nearly gashed a chunk out of my arm with my chef's knife a couple of months ago trying to "plank." Ask Bob.



You'll recognize this stuff as basil leaves and pinenuts in the processor. That's right... PESTO!



One of the more underrated things you can keep in your kitchen is decent quality sea salt. This is the stuff that's in pebble and not grain form. I'm high falutin' when it comes to my seasonings.



Of course, here's where you add oil while processing the nuts and leaves. Personally, I find the whole concept of PESTO! completely overrated, but I must admit this stuff turned out pretty good.



(Allow me to beat this into the ground) Just like magic? PESTO!



Joe set the pesto aside, and got the mushrooms prepped and ready in his mise en place. Translated from French, that means "stuff you keep around in the kitchen to put in other stuff to make stuff with."



Here's a look at all the onions and garlic standing by. Can't do much without onions and garlic.



Another important component of risotto is to have your stock ready to go. I had made an unfortunately small batch of veal stock from scratch, so we used (um, Joe used) the veal stock, white wine, chicken broth, and the mushroom liqueur. You've got to have this stuff up just under a boil and ready to go, because it has to work itself into the arborio grains immediately upon exposure. Can't add cold liquid, it ain't gonna work.



The garlic and onions were flashed in the oil, then the mushrooms went in.



Add in the arborio rice, which is that special expensive rice without the friendly bow-tied gentleman on the box.



The rice needed a few minutes to not only be stirred into the pot, but also to come up to temperature itself. No hard and fast rule here, with the exception of "don't burn it." If your rice is looking like roasted marshmallows, you've probably screwed up.



Next up, add the stock a little at a time. By a little, you want to swamp the mixture so that all the grains have a chance to soak up the stock a little at a time, but you don't want so much stock that it takes forever to absorb. We're not talking Mississippi Delta flood, but definitely get some liquid in there.



Keep it stirring and keep a steady medium heat to the pot. Here's where, if you're doing everything right, the rice absorbs stock and begins to, as we say in the industry, "cook."



Once the rice has absorbed most of the stock in there (no puddles, but no drying out either), add more stock. Again, swamp it and keep it moving.



How long to keep doing this? Until the texture is right. Taste it, you'll know when you got there. At this point, it's done and Joe has mixed in some Asiago cheese and some cream cheese to give it a creaminess. You'll want to serve this right away, and you'll probably want to do your best to avoid leftovers, because microwaves don't do this stuff any favors the next day.



We got it plated up for the group, and finished it with juices from the main course and a dollop of pesto. Joe thought the juices would be a nice touch, tying the meal together flavor-wise. I think he just wanted an excuse to break out his squeeze bottle.



The finished product. Would it be surprising to know this was the hit of the evening?

Bra-Zhoal

I met our hosts a few weeks before the dinner with the intention of determining the menu and finding a nice balance between what they had to spend and what I was capable of cooking. The dinner party was originally slated for six people, but they managed to sneak a seventh and eighth in, which had the dollar signs rolling up in my eyes - but then they mentioned we weren't on the hook for buying the wine, which put those dollars back in retreat.

Since Russo's was a great place for dry goods and such, but a lousy place to expect a full service butcher shop, I steered them towards something I knew I could do well, would be tasty, and wouldn't be a backbreaking expense outside of Russo's. That would be braciole (bra-ZHOAL), which is basically a stuffed beef roll braised in a red wine tomato sauce. Want the recipe? No? Then how about a step-by-step pictorial?





This, my friends, is the simple, humble round steak. Not a fantastic piece of meat, it needs a great deal of help to be truly useful. It won't cook up soft like a filet, it's not the same sort of soft/hearty as a New York Strip. What to do with this then?



This is that. That is now this. Pounded as flat as humanly possible through the Hefty slide lock bag. This is part of what I'm talking about as far as "help" is concerned. As a thick piece of meat, round steak isn't special. Break it down, add some flavor, and you're doing it all sorts of favors.



Flat meat by itself isn't anything spectacular, there's work to be done. Here, as another ode to my blatant over-purchasing self, is an enormous bowl full of stuffing cubes. I might have used three big handfuls out of this bowl, but we'll get to that.



Here's almsot everything you need to start the assembly. Of course, we've got the pounded round on the board. On the left? The Amish Gorgonzola (again, note three wedges in play, only one and a half of which were used). Lower left? Sage leaves. Sea salt and pepper on top, and the bread crumbs, which have been soaking in milk to gain moisture. Not pictured? We'll get to that.



First, attach sage leaves to the beef, which I did by poking them in there really, really firmly. Feel the power, I even broke right through that leaf on the bottom.



Coming in for his second appearance on the menu this evening, we have secret ingredient Prosciutto di Parma. Is there anything that Prosciutto can't make better? Keep in mind, this is a meat often paired with melon, and since melon is often utilized in both a breakfast and a dessert course, the transitive property states that there isn't a meal Prosciutto can't make better. Don't argue this point with me, you couldn't possibly win.



Squished in here real good (and note, only on the fat half) is a nice chunk of Gorgonzola, pressed firmly in place. Can you see where we're going with this yet?



Bread cubes, squeezed as dry as possible, are pressed into place as well. This needs to be as solid and compact as possible, that's why I keep using words like "press" and "poke."



Yes, those are Joe's hands doing the grinding of the pepper, but keep in mind someone had to take the pictures. He might be Julia Child to my fry cook, but when you put him behind the lens I'm Ansel Freaking Adams.



Here's an action shot of the application of sea salt granules, which you can actually see falling from Joe's hand. Frankly, there are two kitchen techniques I find to be completely emotionally satisfying. One would be doing the fry-pan flip thing where you rock the pan back and forth with such action that everything in the pan goes momentarily airborne and lands wrong side up. I may suck with knives, but I rule at that. The other? Pretending like you know exactly how much you're measuring by shaking spices into your palm before dumping them into your dish. And just for the record, people who say "Bam!" were funny five years ago.



Next step? Roll it up. You obviously want the filling as near the center as possible, so you've got to roll out to the non-filled side, pressing tight all the way through. Now, this isn't going to seal on the outside, and that's okay. If you've got a big enough piece of meat to account for that and enough Boy Scout in you to tie a roll with flaps up tightly, then be my guest. Otherwise, this will get you where you need to go.



Tie it once, then tie it again. You're just trying to hold it together, you're not trying to squeeze all the innards out.



If you've been following me so far, you can remember we were cooking dinner for eight. We totally made two additional braciole by accident. Total. Accident.



Now, obviously there's a lot of prep that goes into these things, and there's even a fairly arduous amount of prep work that goes into the cooking pre-cooking cooking that needs to happen once you've got the bracioles assembled. First step is to get a pot nice and hot and sear these bad boys until they get some color. You're not burning them, you're not even worrying about cooking them all the way through right now. All you want to do here is make sure they get browned up in a few spots.



Then yank them. You're going to be left with a ton of residue in the bottom of the pot. Do not idly start scraping the residue even though you knew better to begin with. Joe's liable to yell at you.



In the pot go some onions and garlic.



Probably my favorite non-pork related picture of the whole bunch. Look at how good those onions look. Man, I could just dump those on a plate as-is and be totally satisfied. Still, there's work to do. These are totally done and perfect though, let's move on.



Ah, the crucial deglazing step. That's nothing but red wine (the Protocolo you saw earlier) in there with the onions, garlic, and everything the beef burned to the bottom. Once that wine starts bubbling, all that stuff in the bottom of the pan starts making every little piece of liquid it comes in contact with about 8,000% more tasty. Believe you me.



A little thyme in there, but you're seeing how browned up the red wine got with all those bits loosened up from the bottom.



Add in two large cans of San Marzano tomatoes (whole peeled). If you're cooking Italian and anything you're making is red, if you're not using San Marzano's, you're taking a totally erroneous shortcut.



And back into the pot go the braciole. Now, normally I'm cooking this on the range, bringing this up to a steady bubble, and leaving the liquid to condense into a thicker sauce through evaporation. About 90 minutes later, you've got some awfully tender beef as well. We didn't have that luxury, and made the executive decision...



...to put it in the oven with the lid on. It accelerated the cooking time a bit, but the lid meant the sauce couldn't evaporate. Dang. Not getting the braciole started a couple hours earlier was my big regret from the dinner, but it still tasted pretty good.



Plating it up (and chopping the strings off, naturally).



Finished product braciole plated up with orchietta (I think that's what it's called) tossed with my standard homemade tomato sauce, and one eighth of one bag of green beans.

Everything went over well, but - and don't hate me - I never got pictures of dessert. We had a whole plate of cannoli, half almond, half chocolate with some biscotti to accompany the coffee. In case you were wondering, I don't make the shells, but I do make the cannoli cream from my own recipe. Which rules. We did dishes, packed up, and took off after that, but did manage to find something to do with those last two braciole. Total accident that worked out that way.

I told you I'm prone to overspending.