What's For Dinner?

Braised Baby Back Ribs Over Pasta!

This dish is ridiculous. It's pleasing to both the eye, the palate and the mind, and it cooks slowly so you have a good long time to get excited about it.

I've been making braised baby backs in a tangy tomato sauce for a few years now, and it's a really special dish. I mean, think about it: you're eating ribs... and a hearty bowl of pasta! I'll say that again: ribs and pasta! Not ribs and no pasta. Not pasta and no ribs. But both ribs and pasta. At the same time! Now who wouldn't get fired up about that?

I think technically this probably qualifies as a ragu. But whatever you call it, it rules. I don't really have a recipe, per se, for this dish. I started making it as an attempt to duplicate a Bobby Flay braised rib I once had at a showcase for up and coming New York chefs and it's sort of taken on a life of its own since then.

The basic steps if you wanted to recreate this in your home are as follows:

Cut a rack of baby backs into three sections. (You could also use spareribs for this, but I prefer the baby backs. While I think it's appetizing to slide a few bones out of the meat to underscore the mind-numbing tenderness of the braise, fishing out endless bones and little nubs of gristle gets kind of tiresome.) Season the meat, then powder it with flour and sear it off in a dutch oven or similar deep cooking vessel with a tight-fitting lid.

When you get a good sear on the ribs, remove them to a dish and brown garlic, minced (or grated) carrots, onions and your spices in the remaining fat. (You can really add whatever spices you want to this because, unlike spaghetti and meatballs it doesn't so much need to taste like a classic Italian tomato sauce. Last night I decided to toss in a largeish heap of curry powder and a long squeeze of honey and it was a big hit.) When your aromatics and seasonings are nice and toasty, deglaze the pan with white wine then stir in a can of crushed tomatoes. Next, arrange the ribs, meat side down, so they're almost entirely covered in the sauce. It should look sort of like the log arrangement you'd use when building a fire. Bring the sauce to a bare boil, then cover the pot and slide it into a 300 degree oven for about two hours to finish. Serve each hunk of ribs over pasta and scattered with chopped fresh herbs. Ribs. And pasta. It's magic.

 

Linguini Alfredo!

This would have been better with fresh pasta, but I only decided to make it at the last minute. Alfredo pasta is a really simple dish, but one that requires technique and forethought. The trickiest part is getting the pasta to the table in that magical window where it's still runny and cheesy and hasn't yet turned gloppy and grainy and cold. One way to achieve this is to serve the dish to your family in a sauna. Now, it's very, very unpleasant to eat a heavy, creamy pasta dish in a sauna, but hey, do you want silky alfredo or not? Another way to preserve the viscosity of your alfredo is to serve it in warm bowls. This can be achieved either by dipping your bowls into the pot of boiling pasta water, or by placing them in the oven. It is also advisable to recruit the help of your fastest family member and assign him or her to run the plates into the dining room at a full sprint to stave off cooling.

For the Pasta:
cook some pasta

For the Sauce:
1 1/4 cups heavy cream
2 tbsp butter
s/p to taste
black pepper to taste
red pepper flakes to taste
freshly ground nutmeg to taste
1 cup finely grated Parmesean cheese

I strongly reccomend when making this dish that you buy the best Parmesean you can find. Actual, Parmesean from Parma is expensive, but it has a couple distinct advantages: First of all, it tastes great; secondly, it keeps very well; and finally, unlike most American Parmesean replicants which are intended soley for grating over pasta, authentic Parmesean can be enjoyed as a stand alone cheese or as part of a cheese course. This increases its usefullness and economy.

Don't start your sauce until your water is just approaching the boil. The sauce takes about 20 minutes to cook and then has about a 15 minute window of max deliciousness. So, when your water's just short of the boil, in a wide pan, bring half your cream and all your butter to a simmer over medium heat. Cut the heat to mid-low and let the sauce reduce for 10 minutes. The moment after you add your pasta to the boiling water and give it a stir, add the rest of the cream, the spices and salt to the sauce and return it to a steady simmer. Slowly, handful by handful, add the cheese to the sauce, stirring constantly to ensure creaminess. Fill your bowls with boiling water, or heat them by whatever method you've devised, and instruct your diners to sit down and hold their forks "in the ready position." (If you're serving the meal in a sauna, you can skip these steps.) Drain your pasta in a colander and then quickly tip it into your sauce. I try not to drain the pasta too completely as I believe a small amount of water keeps the sauce silky. Using tongs, cook the pasta in the sauce for about 60 seconds, then heap small portions onto the warm plates and top them with additional cheese. I usually serve this with a salad of tossed bitter greens like chickory.

Buffalo Wings

I believe there is some kind of football contest this weekend, and as such I offer up this recipe for wings. These wings are simply awesome. They take a little while to make because you can only fry about 10 at a time, but I think it's worthwhile.

Start with a family size package of wings and divide them into thirds at the joints. (I make stock with the little bony wing tip things, but if you want to fry them, fine, go ahead.) Heat a good amount of peanut oil in a deep pot or dutch oven to 350 degrees. (I use a candy thermometer to gauge the oil, but it's not a must. You could just put the pot on high for about 12-15 minutes.)

For the Wings:
Combine two tablespoons of corn starch with paprika, salt, black and cayenne peppers to taste and toss the wing segments in the mixture. Pre-heat your oven to 250 degrees. Fry the wings in peanut oil in batches of 10 for 8-10 minutes. Stir the wings with tongs to prevent the wings from cleaving together and place them on a paper towel-lined sheet pan in the oven when done. 

For the Sauce:
A souped up version of Frank's Redhot Sauce was the original sauce for the wings at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY. This, happily, means the best wing sauce is a bottled and widely available product. Frank's makes a readymade wing sauce version of its original product which I imagine is pretty good, but I prefer to doctor up my own sauce. I start with Frank's Original Redhot Sauce and cut in about two tablespoons of butter. Then I add a few splashes of cider vinegar, a spoonfull of brown sugar and couple shakes of Tobasco for additional heat. When your sauce and wings are all ready, simply combine them in a bowl and toss. If you have little ones, as I do, I suggest you mix up a batch of wings with honey or BBQ sauce to spare their tender little tongues. Serve with carrot and celery sticks and blue cheese dressing for dipping.

General Tso's Chicken! Pomegranate!

My bro sent me this online recipe and it turned out to be both easy and fun for the whole fam. I, of course, always enjoy creating Dishes That Don't Seem Like You Should Be Able To Make Them At Home and Oliver and Max liked the sweetness of this and also the broccoli. (For all the talk of kids not eating broccoli, it's one of the things ours will both reliably eat.) I served this with white rice and we had a pomegranate for dessert. I must say, although I consider the pomegranate to be one of the great underachievers of the fruit kingdom, watching your kid eat his first one is pretty heady stuff! We even developed a method of popping the kernels in Max's mouth so he could join the fun.

I followed the recipe here almost exactly with the exception that I used cut out the hot peppers (for the boys) and used chicken breasts I had in the fridge in place of thighs. I pretty much always buy whole chickens at CostCo and cut them up myself. This saves us--and I'm guessing here--about $3 million dollars a year. The savings derives from the fact that I can get three or four meals from a single chicken: one using the dark meat pieces; one from the breasts; and then a dozen or so uses of the stock from the bones and leftovers. I admit I'm a little spooked by the fact that we, as a society, can now raise, kill, clean, prep, package and ship a chicken that costs consumers under $2.50, but I find it helps if you think of "chickens" as vegetables.

The sauce in this recipe is simpler and less syrupy than what you'd get from your local bulletproof Chinese place and that's a big improvement.

Sausages, Lentils and Green Beans

We had sausage, lentils and green beans for dinner the other day. It was pretty good, but somewhat modest, and it wasn’t what I’d originally planned to cook that evening. You see, sausage, lentils and green beans was really just something I threw together at the last minute after an amazing adventure—an adventure during which I faced freezing conditions, a brush with death and confirmed a fact I’d long suspected: unlike Luke Skywalker, I do not have The Force.

I was shoveling snow (obviously,) in the late afternoon, and was planning to start making dinner in time for my family’s return from work and school. Dinner timing is a very explosive subject around here because the period between the boys’ arrival and the commencement of dinner is what my wife and I like to call “The Fussing Hour.” Basically, from the second they walk in the door at 5:30, our three-year-old and our one-year-old whine at full volume until the first few mouthfuls of dinner are consumed. The whining can be interrupted with the application of pretzels, or goldfish crackers, or Dora the Explorer, but these are not our favorite options so, when we have the energy, we generally grin and bear it as best we can, shouting, “How was your day?” and “Good. Yours?” over the histrionics of our offspring.

On sausage/lentil/green bean night I had just finished a good long shovel and was planning to head inside to start cooking when I cleverly managed to lock myself out of the house. I’d left the door open a crack because manipulating my keys after shoveling snow for 90 minutes is torturous, but when I opened the screen door the resulting vacuum pulled the inner door shut.

Now, I happen to be a man who prides himself on his ability to break into his home. On one memorable occasion I even pried open a side window, deposited Oliver—my son and second story man in training—through it with instructions to open the front door. However, after all my shoveling my hands were so frozen the idea of removing my gloves and prying off the knobs that keep the window locked was particularly unappealing, so, knowing the fam was due within the hour, I resolved to wait it out.

At first I tried hunkering down in the garage, but I was wet, my hands were stinging with cold and it was about –5 degrees in there, so I started walking to a nearby shopping center. It seems obvious now that I should have gone to the closest bar and starting drinking immediately, but instead, I chose to go to the library. We recently received a big box of books for Christmas and through them I discovered something: Reading to your kids is a lot less of a chore, and can even be enjoyable, when you’re not reading the book in question for the seven millionth time. (Who knew?) Since making this breakthrough I’d been planning to go to the library anyway, so it seemed like a productive place to wait out my exile.

There are four things in modern day America that indicate a person is, shall we say, “damaged goods.” The first of these is the use of a payphone. (Not a miracle phone, but a regular payphone.) If you’re using a payphone these days, it’s very, very likely you’re up to no good. I believe almost all present day payphone conversations involve drugs, adultery, ransom or a contract kill. The second counterindicator of a sound body and mind, and this may be Madison-specific, is the use of buses. If you’re on the bus in Madison, and you’re not a student, then you’re probably so messed up the government won’t let you drive. The third indication a person is walking the razor’s edge is his or her presence in a Kinko’s copy shop. This is because the entire Kinko’s chain is funded by unemployed people printing resumes, bands making fliers and maniacs printing manifestos in invented languages. The fourth sure sign of whackjobitude is Hanging Out In Libraries.

Now, I am not disparaging libraries. I love libraries. (And I vote.) But Hanging Out in Libraries is a symptom of mental illness, plain and simple. If you go to the library, pick up a couple things and leave, you’re fine. In fact, you might even be smart. If you go to the library with your kids for story hour, more power to you, that sounds fun. But if you head to the library and hunker down with a copy of Outdoor Life or a large print word jumble I’m betting you’re a Crazy-Cat-Lady-level lunatic at best.

After walking around a little to warm up, I called my wife and told her where I was waiting. Then I found a copy of Cannery Row—a book I return to again and again—and sat at a table to read. This seemed pretty innocuous, even pleasant, but I was in for a rude awakening.

I’d only been reading for about three minutes when the doors opened and in strolled the Great Grand Pubah of all Library Hanger Outers. He was about six foot seven, had a long, shaggy gray beard, was wearing at least five coats, orange ski goggles and, the piece de resistance, a surgical mask! Of course, the second this typhoid spreader burst onto the scene he headed directly for my table, and that’s when I made a real and concerted effort to use The Force to redirect him. I closed my eyes and concentrated all the inner energy I could muster on dissuading him from sitting near me. My teeth clenched, my fingertips pressed together, I truly attempted to use my mind to generate some kind of forcefield or psychic ripple that would cause him to change course. Alas, The Force is not strong with me, and Mr. Mask plopped down, not only at my table, but on my side of my table.

Normally, when someone stinky, or crazy, or drunk, sits near me, I’ll wait a few beats before pretending to remember an important appointment. But when it came to the Avian Flu, or whatever ghastly disease was afflicting my mask-wearing tablemate, I took no chances. I was out of there like someone hit the ejector seat, baby! I left a vapor trail bailing out of that situation.

I went into the bathroom and washed my hands for about 14 minutes and then my phone buzzed the wife’s arrival. Pulling up my collar and keeping my head down I sliced through the reading room, out the door, and into the safety of the car. Talk about your rough afternoon! I froze myself half to death, locked myself out of my home, confirmed that I will never be a Jedi and I’ve contracted some kind of exotic disease that will not only turn my lungs to jelly, but will probably make me homeless first. That’s a lose-lose-lose-lose situation by my count.

And that’s why we had sausages, lentils and green beans for dinner.

Calzones!

A craving is a very wonderful thing. It's like having a calling. Some are called to the priesthood, others to make music or paint; some people, I suppose, are summoned by dentistry and tollbooth collecting. I've always thought it's a very lucky thing to know exactly what you want to do in life, because it removes a lot of doubt and clutter from the goal setting process.

On a small, everyday scale, a food craving is beneficial in much the same way. Suddenly, and without devoting any resources to it, you know you want fish. You know fish will make you happy, and a small amount of cognitive fuel is conserved. Your body will often tell you what it needs. I've heard tales of pregnant women eating soil or brick dust without quite knowing why because their bodies were low on a certain mineral. This raises the interesting question, "What nutrient am I deficient in that is contained so richly by Gray's Papaya hot dogs?" because I crave those a lot.

It's often hard to determine what sparks a craving. Sometimes it's a thought; sometimes it's a television commercial, and sometimes, you're just out there shoveling snow, as you do, when suddenly you're hammered by a fierce desire for a calzone. And not just any calzone, but the enormous, family-size calzones from Arturo's, the pizza restaurant across the street from the house in which I grew up.

The Arturo's calzone is what I like to think of as a classic calzone. I know there are a lot of pocket pizza-type deals floating around out there--things with all kinds of sauce and veggies and pepperoni in them--but to me, those are "inside out pizzas," not calzones. In my world, a true calzone can only be filled with riccota, mozzarella and Parmesean cheeses and perhaps sausage or ham. There might sometimes possibly be spinach, but that's pushing it, and there is definitely no sauce.

Arturo's calzones were created by rolling out a full-size pizza crust, piling the cheeses on one side, then folding that sucker over and brick ovening it to golden crustyliciousness. You'd slice them into hunks and all the cheese would flow out and you'd use the chewy, crusty bread to scoop it up. It was like a self-contained cheese fondue/pizza party and was, quite simply, awesome.

Unfortunately, my occupational and culinary callings were thrown into direct conflict by the calzone craving. As a full-time, professional snow management technician, I have to live here in Wisconsin where the shoveling's plentiful and good, and this means I have no access to Arturo's calzones or, for that matter, "real" calzones at all. These Midwestern savages eat deep dish pizza for mercy's sake! You can't expect them to exhibit the restraint and dignity a pure, four-ingredient calzone requires. (Actually, I like deep dish pizza. It's not real pizza, of course, and it's not as good as a thin New York slice, but it's still a fine foodstuff when the mood is right. I also used to prefer New England to Manhattan style clam chowder, but in my current loathing for the Boston Red Sox, I refuse to eat it.)

So, the calzone craving wasn't one I’d be able to buy my way out of. And, since my body was sending clear signals that scurvy or something similar was looming on my nutritional horizon if I didn’t get immediate calzone therapy, I would have to make calzones from scratch. I first turned, as I always do when faced with these situations, to my Complete Collection of Every Issue of Cook's Illustrated Ever. I thumbed through the handy index and found that the CI staff had tackled calzones back in September of 2003. The recipe was called Foolproof Calzones, and, as I am undeniably a fool when it comes to baking, it seemed like a good fit for me.

I love Cook’s Illustrated magazine. I recommend it to everyone and I think it’s a really valuable resource. But there are a few problems with it. The first snag, and this is not the only time I’ve wrestled with it, is that the Cook’s Illustrated gang thinks everyone owns one of those giant, expensive mixers for making doughs. As I do not own one of those mixers, I attempted to perform the 10 minute knead by hand. I went at the sticky, thick dough hammer and tongs and was in a full-body sweat after three minutes. After five minutes I was holding the bowl between my legs and kneading it while crouched over in pain. I now believe kneading a calzone dough for 10 minutes by hand might be the final thing you have to do to qualify for the Navy Seals.

Another problem I consistently encounter with Cook’s Illustrated is that they like to infuse every recipe with a “hook”—an Ah ha! type-tip that you’d never think of yourself, but which appears to pull the whole dish together. (“When we added pineapple juice to the marinade we found the bromoline caused the collagen to start breaking down and blah, blah, blah…”) Sometimes these tips actually work, but a lot of the time I think they’re jammed into the recipes to satisfy some editorial mandate.

Often, when I’m waging my initial assault on a CI recipe, I’m able to identify and dismiss the unnecessary extras. But as I’m an intimidated baker at best, I resolved to follow the calzone recipe to the letter. Unfortunately, the letter, in the case of Foolproof Calzones, suggested the use of many, many sheets of parchments paper that had been treated with cooking spray. I was to roll out doughs into nine-inch rounds, rest them between sheets of parchment while the main hunk of dough was rolled in more parchment. (Actually, it might have been cling wrap. I don’t know. It was kind of a whirlwind in there.) I was then to backtrack, filling calzones in reverse rolling order and placing them on more parchment on the back of a baking sheet. The parchment was then to be trimmed around the ‘zones with surgical precision while my oven was pre-heated to 500 degrees and left for 30 minutes. Unhappily, this preheating made my kitchen get much hotter than the one in the expansive, top-secret Cook’s Illustrated facility must have, and soon I was mummified in a gummy paste of parchment, flour, cheese and cooking spray. Everything was stuck to everything else to the extent that the second I’d wrestled the last calzone and its parchment doily onto the baking sheet to rest, I jumped directly into the shower for a refresh.

Flour free and dry I returned to the kitchen to begin baking and slid the calzones onto my pizza stone. (Actually, it’s just a big paving stone I bought at Home Depot.) Almost as soon as I shut the oven door I became aware that the paper under the calzones was burning and filling the house with smoke. Stupid goddamn parchment paper bane of my existence! I ran around opening doors and turning on fans—it was, after all, 4 degrees, and we Wisconsonites don’t even take down the screens in that sort of weather—and then I rounded up all the blaring smoke detectors and cast them out into the yard. After 12 long minutes playing fireman, I took the calzones out of the oven and discovered that they were perfect!

Crusty and golden, yet chewy and filled with oozing cheese and lurking sausage hunks these were exactly the calzones my body had requested. The bottom was singed by contact with the baking stone and broke with cracker-like crispness against the teeth, and the top, moistened and yielding from the rising steam provided a chewy contrast. We sat down to eat and there was little conversation for several minutes. This was partially because we were busy chewing and savoring and partially because we couldn’t see one another through the smoke.

In the end, the calzones were a semi-success. They were delicious, better than I’d dared hope they might be, but they took a great physical toll on me, required almost an entire day to make, and left the house smoky and cold for many hours. I might try them again without the parchment paper to see if it’s a lot easier, but if it isn’t, I think I’ll need another dose of divine inspiration before baking them again.

Steaks Is High

If you have ever spoken to me for more than six minutes, it’s very likely that I have mentioned to you my love of CostCo. I have a deep and abiding passion for CostCo that is so great I have trouble containing it all within my body. I am an Executive Member at Costco, which is the top level of membership, but if they had a higher tier, I would sign up for that without even inquiring about the benefits. If I had a real job, I would gladly orchestrate some kind of arrangement whereby 90% of my money would be directly deposited at CostCo and in exchange I could just flash my membership tattoo and take whatever I wanted from the warehouse.

For me, shopping at CostCo is not an errand; it’s an event. I plan days around going to CostCo. Before I buy anything anywhere other than CostCo, I ask myself, “Should I wait and buy this from CostCo?” I bought my car from CostCo.

The CostCo here in Madison is brand spankin’ new—it only opened about two months ago—and I think our household has probably experienced about a 14% upturn in quality of life since that glorious day. Of course, mastering the CostCo lifestyle takes some planning and, sadly, it’s not the right fit for everyone. It takes time to extract the greatest benefits from a CostCo membership, and if you don’t practice restraint, CostCo can burn you.

I feel sad whenever I see someone who’s lost a bout with CostCo. CostCo doesn’t mean to hurt anyone. CostCo is a beneficial, but very powerful entity. Like the sun, or a strong medicine, CostCo is a force for good, but too much CostCo, or CostCo in the wrong hands, can be harmful.

The best place to spot people who’ve been burned by CostCo is in the parking lot. Peer into people’s carts and it’s easy to identify the things they came to buy, and the things they ended up buying.

See that guy over there? Check out his cart. He’s got diapers, milk, frozen pizzas, Luna bars, a telescope and a two-pack of wetsuits. Yep. He lost his head and now he’s paying the price. He’s going to feel that in the morning.

Because I have such a healthy respect for the power of the ‘Co, I consider and reconsider just about everything I buy there. There are certain items I restock on every time I go CostCoing: the baby green salad mix, Pellegrino water (the mercifully non-stingy cousin of Perrier,) milk, toothpaste, paper towels. Whenever we run out of any of these items, I head to the ‘Co to replenish. This roster of auto-buy items is extremely exclusive, and I am judicious about making changes to it. I flirted for months with the large, $20 hunks of authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano before taking the plunge. (If you store it properly, it’s a home run.) Recently, however, I made my boldest ever addition to the Master List: Big Beef.

I have been fascinated by CostCo’s giant, unbutchered, cryovaced packages of beef since I first entered the faith three years ago in San Diego. CostCo, if you haven’t been, sells everything in enormous sizes. So, where at a supermarket you could buy one ribeye steak for $8.99 per pound, at CostCo, you can buy five ribeye steaks for $6.99 per pound. The tradeoff being that while you’re paying less, you’re buying more. The essential question you must ask every time you buy food from CostCo is, “Will my small family possibly be able to consume all this before it goes bad? And furthermore, will we be left stoically cramming the last 12 pounds of plums down our gullets in a frantic attempt not to waste them?”

Because I’m aware of how tragically easy it might be to find oneself making, say, portobello mushrooms, the focus of every meal for a week, I’ve always gazed longingly at, but resisted purchasing, the massive sides ‘o beef on sale at the meat counter. CostCo sells uncut beef shoulders, strip steaks and ribeyes in 10-30 pound vacuum-sealed packages for below even the low, low prices they charge for butchered beef. Where you’d pay $6.99 per pound for four individual New York strip steaks, if you buy the entire 15-pound strip and butcher it yourself you pay only $4.99 per pound.

As a guy who relishes his role as chef de cuisine at Maison Connolly—not to mention one who is lavish and attentive in his appreciation of fine beef—I was attracted to the obvious benefits of getting quality meat at about half of supermarket cost. What I wasn’t sure I could do was 1. Butcher what looked like about a quarter cow, and 2. Store all that meat without it deteriorating into mealy undeliciousness.

However, on a recent trip, the discovery of a very manageable-looking 14-pound hunk of strip steak converged with the appearance of my tax return in the ol’ savings account, and I finally pulled the trigger on a Big Beef buy. Driving the meat home, I was in a full-on paroxysm of buyer’s remorse. Could I possibly do justice to the promise of this meat? Or had I violated my own rules and flown too close to the sun?

When I got the beef home I immediately sliced open the package and laid it out on my board. It was an intimidating hunk of flesh to say the least, and I stood over it for some time steeling, not only my knife, but my nerves.

The meat was soft, and as I probed it gently with my fingers, visions of oblong, impossible-to-cook-evenly, money-wasting steaks filled my head. To improve butcherability I then made a very wise decision: I put the beef in my freezer. I checked the meat frequently as it chilled and after 90 minutes it had reached a welcome firmness without freezing. During this time, I also plugged in and cleaned out an unused fridge in the basement.

Readdressing the now firm hunk, I mapped out the cuts I wanted to make with my knife in the fat cap. First, I decided, I would cut my own “Ultimate Steak.” This was a two-and-a-half-inch thick, monstrous, marbled slab I sliced from the end of the strip. One side, of course, was clean cut from where my knife divided it from the rest of the meat, but the other side was all knobs and crannies and little wisps of fat and flesh that promised to crisp up to a nearly indecent degree of delicious. (You can see my baby on the far left in the picture below.)

Next, I cut out an almost equally ridiculous slab for J. (my wife) and O. (kid) to enjoy on “Ultimate Steak Night.” Cutting the meat wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d feared. Especially after its repose in the freezer, the meat was about as hard to cut as, say, a wheel of cheese might be. There were no bones to contend with, and, of course, I take maintenance of my knife very seriously.

In the end, the $50 hunk of beef yielded my two “Ultimate Steaks,” two steak-for-two-sized steaks, four individual serving steaks, and one big honking roast. At this point I started to get excited. (I didn’t really plan to write about this purchase. The reason there are so many pictures, and that the pictures are so crappy, is that I was taking them with my phone and picture messaging my brother about my progress.) Looking at what I’d wrought I finally exhaled a little bit. It certainly seemed like I’d knocked down the big shot.

I mean, that roast alone would run you $30 at a supermarket, and you’d be stealing those four individual steaks for $20, so, in essence, in exchange for a little planning and philosophizing, I was getting the two “Ultimate Steaks” and the two steaks-for-two, for nothing!

Of course, if I couldn’t keep the meat in a way that prevented deterioration, I’d be throwing away everything I’d worked for—dishonoring my family and the animal who’d given its life to put food on our table. “Steaks” were high, so I turned my attention to storage solutions.

I’d actually tapped on the window of the butchers’ room at CostCo and solicited the meatcutter’s advice on keeping my meat in prime condition. He advised me that moisture was the main enemy and that I should dry the meat as much as possible before freezing. As I mentioned previously, I’d cleaned and activated an unused fridge in the basement, so I went down there and lay the steaks and roasts on their fat caps directly on the bars of the refrigerator shelf. This allowed air to circulate around the meat to the greatest possible degree and aided in drying. I then said goodbye to my meat for four days.

I checked on my babies periodically during that anxious time, and when they’d dried out considerably (see picture one below) and had just started thinking about becoming funky, I took them out, sealed them up with a $5 ziplock vacuum thingy and put them in the freezer. (Picture two below.)

I reserved my two “Ultimate Steaks,” for dinner that night and grilled them over hickory chunks—no charcoal, just wood. I served them with a string bean salad and pesto and roasted garlic mashed potatoes.

I built my fire in one corner of the grill and left the opposite side empty. Because a pure wood fire burns hotter and faster than charcoal, I seared the meat to crisp perfection on both sides, then moved it over to the cold side, covered the grill, and let it roast to just past "Pittsburgh rare." (That's is a really great term describing a steak cooked very crisp outside and left quite rare inside.) I removed the meat directly to the serving plates, let them rest for five looooooong minutes, then doused them with extra virgin olive oil and sea salt and dug in.

I have honestly never had a better steak in my life.

I’ve been to a lot of great steakhouses: Peter Luger’s, Wolfgang’s, N9ne, Morton’s, Au Boeuf Couronne' in Paris. I also did a story a while back about attending BBQ U, so I got to eat a steak cooked by PBS grillmaster Steven Raichlen. And while I have possibly consumed better quality meat than I had on “Ultimate Steak Night,” I have never had a better all-around steak experience. The sense of ownership and participation in the meal, the fact that I nailed the cooking, the sense that I’d be able to replicate this success, and the fact that I was actually saving the family money all contributed to my net  enjoyment.

Take a look back at the picture of my “Ultimate Steak” above. See that little pointy endpiece? Can you imagine how smoky, fatty, crispy that got? I had chills when ate that.

So, in the end, The Great Steak experiment has yielded no less than a significant lump sum improvement in the quality of our lives. I’m now getting custom butchered, dry-aged beef for less than $5 a pound. It’s damn near a superpower.

Friday Gravy--A Meatball Manifesto

Well, it happened again. Friday rolled around, as it seems to every six days or so, and just as reliably my thoughts began to turn to spaghetti and meatballs. Growing up in Brooklyn my family knew only two options for Friday night dinner: we either went to Snooky’s Pub (cheese sticks, burger in a basket;) or we had spaghetti and sauce.

Most of the time the sauce we made consisted of a large number of Italian sausages, both hot and sweet, chopped into chunks, fried in a pan and then moved over to simmer in a snazzed-up pot of Aunt Millie’s jarred tomato sauce. While the sauce percolated my brother and I would keep watchful eyes on one another and balefully tattle to our parents each time we suspected the other had pinched a sausage hunk. Then, as soon as the culprit was being disciplined, we’d creep off to nab our own score-evening sausage.

One of the things I love most about food is how your perceptions of it vary from day to day and even from hour to hour. Probably the keenest example of this is Kennedy Fried Chicken. Kennedy Friend Chicken is, I believe, an exclusively Brooklyn-based enterprise, and they basically look like Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants that were knocked off by a third world counterfeiting operation. The colors and fundamental design are the same as a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the chicken is likewise reliably fried and cheap.

The most obvious departure between Kennedy and Kentucky Fried Chickens, of course, is in the name. The mind readily furnishes the basis of a link between Kentucky and fine fried chicken, whereas the chicken significance of “Kennedy” is a bit harder to imagine. The more important distinction, however, takes place on the menu board. Where Kentucky Fried Chicken basically just has chicken, Kennedy Fried Chicken has, well, everything else. Kennedy makes chicken, obviously, but they also have pizza, ribs, gyros, halal goat stew, Jamaican beef patties, hot dogs, ice cream, burgers, pork fried rice, tacos, fried pork skins, twenty-five cent drinks (or are they now fifty-cent drinks?) and just about every other cheap and fast foodstuff you could name. They’re also open until the wee hours of the morning.

When my brother and I lived in Bed Stuy in 2000 and 2001 there was a Kennedy Fried Chicken right outside our train station. Often, returning home after a late night on the town, we’d stop in and grab something to eat before passing out.

These ill-advised bedtime snack boxes are the sternest illustration of how food perceptions can change almost instantly. When you sat down to consume your fat feast it was, if not mouth-watering, at least desirable, but then, only seconds after you finished—and sometimes even before you finished—it transformed into a disgusting food nightmare you wouldn’t eat if it floated by you as you clung to a plank after a shipwreck.

In my work as Travel Writer I am often hosted by some pretty fabulous hotels and some very influential tourism boards. These happy associations lead to my experiencing a great number of “tasting menus.” The Tasting Menu, as I’m sure you know, is a wonderful way to eat. It’s when a kitchen prepares a lot of small plates of interesting things or things they consider to be their specialties, often pairing each course with a different wine.

Now, I love a tasting menu. I love a duet of fois gras and veal cheek spring rolls on a bed of pea shoots drizzled with 700-year-old balsamic vinegar so thick you have to cut it with a knife. (Damn! I just made that up, but it sounds awesome!) I love a tiny scoop of black pepper and olive oil ice cream served in a warm, honey-laced puff pastry cup on a bed of dandelion greens. (I’m on a roll, baby! Is someone taking notes?) But you know what else I love? Deep-fried cheese curds! You know what else I love? Jerk Pork cooked on a big slab of corrugated iron roofing material. You know what else I love? A fiery bowl of Pho at the airport in Saigon; white rice with butter; English muffins!

Food desire can change at the drop of a hat. It’s one of the greatest things about food that, depending on your mood, a baked potato can trump a grilled lobster tail. (No. Not really. Grilled lobster tail is the royal flush of food. But you get the point.)

I remember once being seated in restaurant high up in a Las Vegas casino. There were some heavy hitters at the table including a few well-known food writers, the owner of the casino, and both the head chef and the owner of the restaurant we were in. The (very charming) owner of this restaurant was a cognac collector—he’d travel the world buying up the cellars of recently-deceased other cognac collectors—and as the lights of Vegas winked up at us from all sides he brought out a bottle of cognac which, he said, represented the last remaining drops of a particularly distinguished vintage.

We’d feasted that night. We must have had at least a dozen dishes, each more intriguing and delicious than the last, and as the gallant restaurateur poured out the last five or six glasses of this hall of fame cognac that would ever be consumed in the history of the world I… was looking out the window at an In-N-Out Burger a few miles down the strip and wondering how late it stayed open.

Your stomach doesn’t lie. It wants what it wants without regard to what it’s going to get. Sometimes it wants a deconstructed kobe beef napoleon with shaved white truffles, and sometimes it wants a Gray’s Papaya hot dog with onions. (In my case, in fact, it always wants a Gray’s Papaya hot dog with onions.)

And whenever it’s Friday, no matter where I am in the world, my thoughts, or rather my stomach’s thoughts, inevitably turn to spaghetti and meatballs.

Spaghetti and meatballs is of very great importance to me as it represents not just Friday Night Dinner, but also Friday Night Monopoly followed by Friday Night Family Biathlon (BB Gun target shooting and “bopper” fencing with foam pipe insulator swords.)

Spaghetti and meatballs, in fact, is one of a small group of dishes I think of as “research recipes;” dishes I am on a lifelong quest to perfect. Each time I make spaghetti and meatballs I consciously and studiously attempt to improve on my last effort. I have tested dozens of spaghetti and meatball theories and discarded or adopted dozens of spaghetti and meatball techniques. What follows is a comprehensive and up-to-date look at the recipe my research has yielded so far.

Spaghetti and Meatballs: A Recipe/Philosophy
The Golden Rule of my spaghetti and meatballs recipe is as follows: Balls And Sauce Nary Shall Meet Yea Until It Be On The Serving Plate!

I know this will be a bit of a shakeup for you adherents to Long-Simmered Sauce Philosophies, but don’t worry, as you will soon see, I have you covered. But before I explain my theories on producing a meaty sauce without actually simmering the meatballs in the liquid, let me tell you why I prefer independent production of balls and sauce: It all comes down to crust.

If you brown your balls and them cook them in the sauce the best you’ll end up with is a meager vestige of a crust. However, when you cook the two items separately, uniting them only at the last moment, you never compromise the all-important texture contrast we crave in our meatballs.

“But Chris,” I hear you fretting, “doesn’t this approach diminish the meatiness of the sauce itself?”

Good question. Yes. It would. Except that you are going to designate what I call “A Sacrificial Meatball.” More on this in a moment.

Ball Construction

I make lots of different kinds of meatballs. The ones you see pictured here are turkey meatballs. I also make all-beef meatballs; half beef, half de-cased hot Italian sausage meatballs; and sometimes, when I’m trying to blow minds, half-beef, half de-cased hot Italian sausage meatballs with hunks of mozzarella encased inside. (Yeah. Take a minute and ponder that.)

But no matter what kinds of balls I’m making, I always use the same basic recipe: meat, hot pepper flakes (lots;) black pepper; a tiny bit of salt in the mix (because I resalt the formed meatball;) grated parmesan; and finally, breadcrumbs. I use a lot of breadcrumbs because I think they’re the key element to making true meatballs and not just small, round hamburgers.

I have done a lot of research, as you’d probably guess, into the science of meatball formation. Since crust is my overarching goal, I used to actually make meatcubes which I would sear on all six sides. This was a heady and, I must admit, somewhat reckless time in my life, but I was pretty sure I was onto something big. Unfortunately, after only a few meatcube experiments I realized that unless one made the cube absolutely enormous the protracted pan time required for six-side searing generally resulted in a finished product as crunchy as a crouton. It also took forever.

These days I’m a more modest and mature ball former. Having dabbled, over the years, with everything from cubes to oblong, ovular patties, I’ve now come full-circle and just make ball-shaped balls. I do press them down a bit in the pan to increase surface area, but my current theory is that when shaping your balls it’s best to keep things simple.

So, I sear the meatballs on all sides, rolling them around in the pan and pressing them down to ensure a hearty crust. Normally, of course, pressing down on things you’re cooking is a no-no because you’re squeezing out the juices, but I’d argue that in meatballs it’s a necessary step. First of all, the breadcrumbs allow the meatballs to retain most of their moistness; secondly, you’re going to serve the meatballs in a sauce, which adds more moisture; and finally, you want the meatballs to extrude a bit of juice into the pan so you can build your sauce.

When the meatballs have all been seared off I remove them to a second pre-heated pan in a pre-heated oven to finish cooking. (350 degrees will do nicely, thanks.) This, as you may remember, is pan-roasting, which is how I cook almost everything. (I also promised to talk about pan-roasting liquids, and that’s coming up in a second.)

Pan-Roasted Tomato Sauce
You may have wondered why I make my sauce in an Americanized version of a wok. (It’s Americanized in that it has a flat bottom, rather than the rounded bottom of a classic Asian wok, the flat bottom being better suited to flat American burners.) I like the wok because I bake my tomato sauce and the wide mouth allows more sauce-to-heat contact. The reason I like to bake my sauce is because when you do so, you effectively “roast” the surface of the sauce and this artificially ages it so it tastes like something you cooked for a really long time.

So, at this point your meatballs are baking in the oven and you have a big wok full of yummy brown bits. Now’s where you’re going to introduce the meaty favor into the sauce.

Remember the Sacrificial Meatball I mentioned above? This is where he comes in. When you slid the meatballs into the oven, you took one little guy out and placed him back in the wok. Now, take a sharp metal spatula and chop him up into little bits, or alternately, remove him to your cutting board and wack him there.

You will probably feel kind of bad for this poor fellow because he won’t get to be enjoyed as nice, crusty, stand-alone meatball, but you can rest easy knowing that he’s making the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good.

Once the meatball has been dispatched and browned, move his remnants to the sides of your wok, or, if you don’t have a wok, your frying pan, and put garlic and whatever spices you want to use in the center of the pan to toast. When the garlic just starts taking on some color, scoop one small can of tomato paste into the wok and mix everything together.

In a rather recent development I have now decided that working the tomato paste a tad is a very crucial thing. I like to turn the heat up fairly high and cook the paste until you start to see a little halo of oil seeping out of it and it chars a bit around the edges. I think doing this effectively “toasts” the paste and adds to the overall richness of the sauce.

After that, deglaze your wok/pan with wine (I like to use white wine because it adds a little sharpness, but I often use red as well,) then, stir in a good couple tablespoons of honey. (This will make your canned tomatoes taste sweeter and “fresher.”) After the wine simmers for about 45 seconds, stir in a large can of crushed tomatoes, bring the sauce to a boil and then put it into the oven to roast.

About 20-25 minutes of roasting at 350 will produce a sauce that tastes like you started cooking it slowly about 2 days before. Somehow, this “pan roasting” dries the sauce out somewhat and makes it feel more substantial on the tongue.

Because, if you were to roast your already-mostly-cooked meatballs for another half hour, they’d come out like charcoal, as you put the sauce in the oven, take the meatballs out and leave them on the stovetop. You can put them back into the oven to reheat in the last five minutes of sauce roasting. Do not cover them or they will steam and lose crustiliciousness

Pasta

Because this recipe produces such a thick, clingy sauce, I think it goes best with linguini. Sadly, linguini is a very frustrating noodle for three-year-olds, so we’re currently going with some chunkier pasta shapes. I usually let Oliver pick the pasta out at the store, maintaining, of course, veto power over asinine choices like angel hair, Spider Man Mask pasta or elbow macaroni.

I always cook my pasta in my largest pot in a lot of salted water. I start the water on a back burner as soon as I start the meatballs, and then transfer it to the main burner once everything else is off the stovetop.

I don’t have any secrets about cooking pasta. It’s a pretty simple process. One thing I do is grate parmesan cheese onto the noodles once they are drained. I heard someone say once that this helps the cheese adhere to the noodles and infuses the whole dish with a more uniform, cheesy taste. I have never actually tested this out, but I do it anyway just in case it’s true.

Reunited And It Feels So Good

Okay, to finish off your masterpiece, take the sauce out of the oven and stir in a handful of fresh herbs. You may find a ring of charred sauce around the edges of your pan/wok. This is tasty stuff in limited amounts and I usually try to stir about a quarter inch of it down into the finished sauce.

All that’s left now is to heap your noodles into serving bowls, top them with a couple meatballs, a spoonful of sauce, and some additional cheese. (Although you have already thoughtfully ensured your customers’ pasta cheesiness, the visual effect of snow-like grated cheese is essential to the visual appeal of spaghetti and meatballs.)

I have many various versions of this master sauce recipe—some include the sausage hunks of my youth, some use fresh tomatoes, once, I even grilled mushrooms, sausages, onions, garlic and meatballs over charcoal then combined them in a pot of crushed tomatoes on the stovetop to produce what may have been the world’s first grilled tomato sauce!—but the master principles of my sauce are always the same: safeguard your crust, toast your paste, bake your sauce, and most importantly of all, feel the love!

Thank God it’s Friday.