Author Archive: PaulKenny

I Don’t Drink Tequila….

I Don’t Drink Tequila….Because every time I do…I wake up in Mexico.

This was one of my college roommate’s classic lines from our University days. Back in the day, we drank a lot. While we did not drink much tequila, we did drink more than our fair share of cheap beer. Ironically, we have both developed a taste for finer wines. Getting together these days is a chance to explore our wine collections and test out new recipes.

My buddy Ron Iles and his wife Amy live in Manhattan and have been working on a business opportunity nearby  us in Memphis. A few weeks ago they spent the night with us. I got to try out a new menu and an old bottle of wine.

Menu

Wine

  • Brunello di Montalcino DOCG Col d’Orcia 2002

There more than a few big hits in the menu:

The Acorn Squash Ravioli with a Brown Butter Sage Sauce was really good. I have been on a kick of making ravioli.  My son says I am obsessed. The lightness of the homemade pasta sets the stage for a multi sensorial treat. The combination of the squash with the brown butter/sage sauce was special. Both the pasta and the sauce were light. The combination had everyone fighting over the last ravioli.

The Grill Roasted Rosemary Chicken is an old standby for us that is simple and a real crowd pleaser. I preheat the grill, and then cook the butterflied chicken on a bed of fresh rosemary. The combination of the char grill and roasted rosemary develops a wonderful flavor.

The bottle of Brunello di Montalcino DOCG Col d’Orcia 2002 was special. We bought it at this Tuscan vineyard back in 2016. I had forgotten about it and when I saw it, I remembered the vineyard being so proud of their organic wine and thinking:

Organic = No preservative = Questionable shelf life

It turns out that my fears were unfounded as this 17 year old bottle of wine was fantastic. Ron has graduated from our days of drinking Genesee Cream Ale and Baby Labatt’s in the North Country to having one of the best wine collections of anyone I know. He lives in Manhattan and keeps a few bottles there, but has a wonderful wine cellar at their weekend place in the Berkshires. He has been traveling the world and buying cases for years. He is trying to get their kids to buy shares in his collection. I want to get adopted.

Note: Ron & Amy’s wine cellar in the Berkshires

This Impromptu Friday Night turned into a wonderful combination of Old Friends, Great Food and Fine Wine…and nobody woke up in Mexico.

If you enjoyed this blog and similar other stories/supper club lessons follow me on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and check out my book Impromptu Friday Nights a Guide to Supper Clubs. Published by Morgan James Publishing and available through most channels where books are sold.

Flavor Panels (aka Dinner Parties)

How do food companies make decisions on product formulas or recipes? They rely on food panels or groups of trained flavor panelists to tell them what they like. In many ways Supper Clubs are like food panels. The menu developer and the cook are looking to their dinner party guests to tell them what they liked. And, what was a bad idea.

A few weeks ago I developed a menu for our local supper club based on Tapas. This last weekend there were 3 dinner parties in our neighborhood where 27 people were flavor panelists telling us what they liked and what they did not. Supper Clubbers by nature are nice. It is pretty hard to get real, critical feedback directly. You might hear though the grapevine that somebody didn’t like something. But it is rare.

The one theme of feedback that I hear is that my menus are too hard and too complicated.  GUILTY! I developed the original menu with 12 items and had the goal to get it down to 6. We had a trial run dinner party and my flavor panel (aka dinner party guests) argued long and loud to keep it at 10. This translated into a 13 page menu/recipe packet. There is no question that the sheer volume of recipes was daunting. The good news is that with 8 to 10 people at the dinner party there was plenty of opportunity to delegate and share the workload.

The story that is often told in this blog space is that I am a trained flavor panelist. The truth is that I have been trained 3 times. One of the reasons for going through training three times, is that I am not very good. A truly discerning palette is rare and a gift. For example, I worked in the chocolate business and we had a senior Sales Manager named Bill who thought he was the expert on chocolate. Well after training and testing it turned out that Bill couldn’t hold a candle to his secretary Sharon. Poor Bill never recovered.

Another reality is the old marketing line we used to use for our Flavors of Cooking line of products at Kraft Food Ingredients: “Nothing influences that flavor food more than how it is cooked”.It is so true. Our friend that hosted the dinner party that we attended, explained to me why she is intimated by hosting a party where the author of the menu is a guest. She reminded me of the time where 3 groups of dinner parties were merged into one house. So 3 different cooks prepared each item. Most of the dishes looked completely different. My friend was worried that the dishes at her party would not look anything like what the author had intended. The good news was twofold:

  1. Everything I saw looked exactly as it was supposed to.
  2. It doesn’t really matter if it looks like what the author intended as long as it tastes pretty good.

Did your flavor panel like it? That’s all that matters!

 

Tapas Menu

If you enjoyed this blog and similar other stories/supper club lessons follow me on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and check out my book Impromptu Friday Nights a Guide to Supper Clubs. Published by Morgan James Publishing and available through most channels where books are sold.