“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.

If you enjoy this blog and similar other stories/supper club lessons subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and be on the look out for my book Impromptu Friday Nights a Guide to Supper Clubs due out from Morgan James Publishing on January 30, 2018.

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

A Few Tricks To Replace Fat And Salt.

Adding a little fat and salt is a great way to add flavor to your supper club menus. It just isn’t the healthiest thing for you. In working with some great scientists and chefs at Kraft I have learned a few tricks. For me the key is cutting back and finding healthier alternatives.

A great example of this is a “Beurre blanc” sauce that I make. The traditional French recipe calls for adding butter at multiple stages of preparation. The butter gives the sauce the rich, creamy flavor and mouth-feel. They key is the addition of butter at final stage as a thickener.

What I do is replace butter with olive oil to sauté the shallot and garlic at the first stage. In the final stage instead of using butter I use cornstarch as a thickener. The starch system is not at flavorful as butter and delivers a wonderful mouth feel. The net result is that sauce is lighter and really good.

In the 1990’s my wife was trying to cut back on the fat our children consumed so they were brought up eating Philadelphia “Free” no fat cream cheese. One day our daughter came back from a sleepover at girlfriend’s house and she was irate. Her friend’s mom served her real cream cheese with her bagel and our daughter realized that mom had been giving her the crappy “Free” product for years. She got over it and “Free” disappeared from the market.

One great way to reduce the salt in a dish and still have it pop with flavor is to add a little capsicum. Adding pepper, white pepper, cayenne or even a little Tabasco really helps reduced salt dishes. Capsicum is the component in pepper that delivers the heat. A little spice/heat goes a long way to replace salt’s impact on a dish.

The attached recipe uses my version of a “Beurre blanc” sauce that uses no butter and wasabi powder. The heat (capsicum) in the wasabi allows you to cut back on the salt and still deliver a very flavorful dish.

Check out the recipe

Fat and salt deliver flavor. Moderation is the key to healthiness. There are ways to deliver great flavor to your supper club menu. The tricks outlined above are ways to make your dishes healthier.

If you enjoy this blog and similar other stories/supper club lessons subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and be on the look out for my book Impromptu Friday Nights a Guide to Supper Clubs due out from Morgan James Publishing on January 30, 2018