Do You Remember Your First Time?

A great thing about supper clubs is that they can be a venue for you to try things you have never had before. With someone else writing the menu there is a good chance you get to taste something’s that are completely new.

I can remember the first time I really had truffles. While I had eaten dishes that said they had truffles in them I had never experienced real truffles until we visited Tuscany. Our first night in Montepulciano we ate at Ristorante La Grotta. As we were looking at our menus as a waiter came by with a plate of Tagliderini al Tartufo. The aroma was amazing, but also hard to describe. It certainly was not like anything we had ever smelled or eaten before.

The next day we went on a truffle hunt with an old man in his 80’s and his two dogs. After a few hours our guide had found us a large handful of white truffles that we took back to the kitchens of Il Podere Casale where the chef made up a 4 course meal with each course featuring the wonderful truffles we found that day.

I once saw an old friend at a corporate event and in passing asked “What is new and exciting”. To which he replied: “Like my wife says, it may not be new, but it is still exciting”. Truffles like we had in Tuscany will always be exciting. Given the cost of truffles in the U.S. I doubt I will be writing supper club recipes for them. The great thing about supper clubs is that they are a great venue for that “first time” experience.

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“Many People Have Eaten In This Kitchen And Some Have Lived To Talk About It”.

One of the beauties of being in a supper club is that you get an audience to test your culinary skills with. Supper clubbers by their nature are a receptive audience. They just enjoy socializing over a meal.

Growing up with two older sisters and mother that were good cooks, I was kept out of the kitchen. I really didn’t start cooking until getting out of business school. I had an apartment with my good friend from school Tom Julian. TJ was definitely my first culinary victim. He was from Utica NY and used to say everything I made tasted like “mischambrul”. We think that word is Utica slang derived from the Italian ‘mischiato’ which mean mixed up.

I experimented on poor Tom. Everything I made was based in a combination of garlic and onion. Even in those early years I was trying to replicate dishes from local restaurants. I learned early that if you offer to cook, people will come. Tom and I did our fare amount of entertaining and free food ensured an audience.

Being from Utica Tom used to talk fondly of the flavors from his youth. He would go on and on about the “Greens” from the restaurant Grimaldi’s. I tried to replicate this dish from his waxing. The result is what I call Baked Escarole. There is probably more garlic and onion in my recipe than Grimaldi’s, but Tom didn’t complain.

Check out the recipe:

Whether at a supper club or experimenting on poor Tom, make it and they will come. The key is to have a good time over a meal.

Does Losing Control Scare You?

One of the scary variables of supper clubs is control. Most supper clubs involve the delegation of the food preparation to spread the work. The more you delegate the less you control.

It is an interesting dynamic. Most people are pretty good cooks. It isn’t rocket science. Some people are not good cooks, but they like being in a supper clubs because they like the socialization. Others who are not good cooks are in clubs because they want to learn. Sometimes the bad cooks/slow learners can make people sick with bad cooking.

We once had a supper club where I delegated a salad. A friend who is a bad cook/slow learner brought the salad. He mixed the salad with the dressing hours before the dinner. By the time we started to serve the salad was brown and wilted. I was worried about food poisoning and swapped out new lettuce for old to save the day. I also put my friend on the list to bring a bottle of wine instead of make a dish.

Check out the recipe

Cooking takes common sense. There are some people that are really smart, but don’t have common sense. I know this guy who is a brain surgeon (really smart) and is into doing things himself around the house. He installed his own chimney when adding a wood stove to his den. The house caught on fire twice from the poorly installed chimney. He is a smart guy with no common sense and a bad guy to delegate cooking to.

OK, I will confess, I can be a control freak. I do want my food to look and taste certain way. Quite often I wind up doing too much of the work because I want to control. I have found that there are people I really trust and there are people I trust to do certain things. My son Brian and my brother in law Bobby are guys I really trust. (Check out the blog about “My favorite communist”) My friend Kathy who isn’t a great cook, but is really smart and has great common sense is a person I trust to do certain things.

The key to supper club control is to try to give people things they can handle. Some people can cook and some people can bring a bottle of wine