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CHAPTER 1
Finding the Right People
Getting people who mesh well together is always a challenge. One benefit of supper clubs is coming across all kinds of people. The good news is that you get to meet people. The bad news is that the chances of them being a great fit are pretty slim. One of the beauties of my supper club experience is that my wife and I have used the more formal supper club, where there are a lot of people, to find the smaller group that we really wanted to be friends with. In the end, dealing with a few jerks can be worth it if you get to know some very interesting people.
The solutions on how to find people to participate in a supper club are broad ranging:
• Neighborhood groups. This is one of the easiest ways to find people and conveniently located. The Classic Supper Club model is based on our neighborhood. We have a neighborhood association that publishes a newsletter. There is a section that advertises participation in the supper club. I have actually heard of people that bought a house in our neighborhood because they knew about the supper club.
•Internet groups. One site you could use to get started getting together with people over food isgrubwithus.com. People get connected through the site, usually at a local restaurant.
• Colleagues. We all spend quite a bit of time with the people we work with. The subject of socializing over a meal is very easy to interject. When I lived in Delaware, I traveled with a guy I worked with. We would dine together on a Wednesday night, and the subject of my supper club would come up. It didn't take long for him to want to be part of the Saturday night supper club, where I would try to replicate the dishes we shared at a restaurant the previous Wednesday.
• Church groups.
• School groups.
• Facebook friends.
The supper clubs I have been involved with have led to real friendships. We have formed clubs from the wide array of sources listed above and have learned there is no one right way to find the right people. Trial and error is the only way. Going through a few bad experiences makes you appreciate the good ones.
Finding the right people has some real benefits. While most of us know a thing or two about wine, it is great to have a wine and beer experts in the group.
My friend Scott is the perfect example. He is excellent at paring the right wine with the menu. Scott, like many wine "experts," has an excellent wine collection and is great at offering up a few (or 10) delicious bottles from his cellar. Scott was such a good customer of the local wine store affectionately named "Germantown Baptist Wine and Liquor" by Scott's wife, Kathy, that when he moved, the wine store flew their flag at half-mast for weeks.
In my neighborhood, we are also blessed to have a "beer guy" as well. Tom Schoelkopf worked for Anheuser-Busch and is a great guy to have at a party. You can count on him to bring a good selection of Budweiser's classic product as well as some newer products they are developing. For many of our supper club events, people are asked to bring an appetizer. Tom is famous for asking, "Do you want me to cook, or should I just bring beer?" Somehow, the answers are pretty consistent.
It can be difficult to find the right people for a supper club. A good thing about being part of a larger group is that you get to meet a lot of people. Some you will like, and others, not so much.
One of my pet peeves is people using cell phones to make calls in the middle of a dinner party. I have to state up front that I, like many of us, am addicted to my cell phone. While I am not the nerdiest of nerds, in my circle of baby boomer friends, I am definitely up there as far as being technologically adept. If you really want to be bored, I can take you through the app I have developed to calculate golf bets. With this said, I also believe you have to draw the line.
There have been times where a guest has made a call from the table at a supper club dinner. One guy made multiple calls to his daughter while she was on a date. I guess he wanted us to know that his daughter was dating the starring baseball player from the local high school. (Ten years later, the pitcher has signed a $127 million dollar contract. He didn't marry the daughter.) For the next supper club, I wrote a menu and put a notice stating, "Please refrain from making cell phone calls from the dinner table" on it. I am not quite sure if it was because of the notice, but the offender dropped out of the club. Virtually the same scenario has happened more than once over the last 15 years.
With the above said, the rules on the use of cell phones at the dinner table are changing. My wife simply hates it. I find myself using it occasionally. Many millennials have phones as extended appendages. The key with a supper club is to establish ground rules that members can agree on or at least respect.
Set a Direction for the Club
Setting ground rules has been a topic of discussion in more than a few clubs I have been involved with. While there are all types of clubs from formal to very informal, it makes sense to have clear delineation of:
• Roles and responsibilities
• The degree of culinary complexity
• How often you meet
• Who pays for what
• The use of cell phones at the dinner table and other agreed-upon etiquette
Different types of clubs will require different levels of structure. There is no correct answer for all, and I have seen the level of structure change dramatically over time for different clubs. Like anything else, it has to do with people's personalities and preferences.
One of the key concepts behind a successful supper club is member participation. That means that the host has to give up complete control. My wife will tell you that I am a control freak when it comes to food. When giving up control, there is a certain level of danger and a risk to quality. We once had a dinner where I farmed out the salad. I thought it was a simple salad. What is simple for one can be a challenge for another. Our guest decided to mix the salad with the dressing hours before the dinner. By the time it came to serve it, the lettuce was a rancid looking off-color. Not wanting to risk the health of the other guests or hurt the feelings of the challenged salad maker, I tried to rescue the non-lettuce portions of the salad and whipped up a new salad with fresh lettuce and dressing.
The moral of this story is that it is best to try to correlate the complexity of the item being farmed out with the culinary skill level of the contributor. Beyond that, you have to be flexible.
CHAPTER 2
Mise en Place
Preparation is a simple concept. If you can get things ready in advance, it takes the pressure off when you have to pull the meal together. The beauty of preparation is that it increases your chances of success and reduces stress. Having the work done in advance allows you to enjoy your guests and the event.
When it comes to food, the French really know their stuff. My work took me to France many times. With all the time I spent there, it is hard for me to remember a bad meal. I have had good meals in French airports. I even had a great meal in a factory cafeteria (I had these wax beans with shallots that were so good I spent years trying to replicate the flavor). One of the keys to French cuisine goes back to the culinary school lesson about mise en place.
Loosely translated, mise en place means "putting into place." My definition of mise en place includes all the key steps to get ready for a dinner: menu development, event planning and meal preparation. The goal is to get as much done in advance as possible.
I break the process down into four stages:
1. Theme creation 2. Menu development 3. Shopping list/work plan 4. Preparation
Theme Creation
Having a theme for the meal helps coordination. Quite often, the theme builds off of the main course. For me, an idea for a theme usually goes back to a restaurant, travel or media exposure. A great meal at an Italian restaurant can spark the theme. A meal I had in the Hamptons last summer could be the genesis. Increasingly, we can find themes in a TV show or an Internet article. Having a theme for your meal also creates a connection for your guests. As you are coming up with your theme, you want it to be something that will help your guests get excited about the meal.
Menu Development
The menu should build off of the theme. For menu ideas, I go back to the restaurants, travel and media sources where I found my idea for the theme. The Internet has become the primary research source for so many aspects of our lives, and menu development is certainly no exception.
I like to draft out the menu thinking about:
• Great meals I have had
• What is available in the local market (living in Memphis, it is what I saw at Costco last week)
• Local produce that is in season
• The skill level of the supper club members
• The culinary tools available (For example, I love homemade French fries. While making them in my home fry station is easy, it would be a little difficult to pull off in a kitchen without a deep fryer.)
• The time I have to prepare
Mise en place is all about organization with the goal of making the process easy. Again, the more you prepare, the less stressful it is at show time. I try to develop menus that require a minimal amount of last-minute preparation. This can be easier said than done. If it is a tradeoff between when I prepare a dish and quality, I will usually defer to quality.
I recently developed a menu for a supper club calling for mac and cheese. Working at Kraft, you might guess I had a little experience with pasta and cheese sauce. For years, we served M&C at trade show events and always struggled to keep the M&C saucy. The problem is that pasta acts like a sponge. If you make your M&C in advance, the chances are that it will be dry when you reheat it. I used to work with the guy that developed the cheese sauce for the original "Blue Box" product. It was always great to tell my kids' friends that I worked with the guy that invented Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. They would say, "Boy, he must be rich." To which I would respond, "No, he is just fat!" The solution to keeping your mac and cheese saucy is to increase the ratio of sauce to pasta and to have the sauce and pasta prepared in advance and mix the two at the last minute before reheating in the oven.
The Shopping List/Work Plan
The best way to get started on a shopping list is to use an existing menu or to outline one yourself. With the menu in hand, develop a list with all the ingredients you need. From that you can code the ingredients by store and by location in the market. I find that I like to buy different ingredients at different stores. For example, I think Costco meats* are great and I love the baguettes at the Fresh Market, so I will code my shopping list accordingly.
Following are two examples of a shopping list and work plan.
Example 1
First, I take the menu (my California Cuisine Menu) and develop a shopping list and work plan:
• Menu item
• Ingredient
• Store to buy it in
• Where in the store to find it
• When to prepare it
Example 2
Second, I sort the shopping list by store and by section of the market.
[TABLE OMITTED]
Preparation
Here is where the real work has to be done. I try to follow the work plan, but things always come up. Your goal should be to get as much of your prep work done as early as possible. The one thing they never show you on cooking shows is all the prep work that goes into a meal. Great chefs spend an inordinate amount of their time slicing and dicing. The best chef I know, who has as much staff as anyone, is getting close to retirement and told me, "I am tired of spending my life slicing and dicing."
While it is the nature of the beast, the beauty of working with good chefs is watching their tricks of the trade that expedite the process. Simple things can save a lot of time. I was once working on an event in a Chicago hotel and a sous-chef was preparing green beans. I always cut the ends off one bean at a time. The experienced chef takes 10 beans at a time, taps the ends on a table to line them up and then trims ten at a time. Simple!
I believe in food processors, mandolines and good knives. Some people have complained that my menus are too time consuming. When talking to one complainant, she told me she spent half an hour chopping onions. I responded by asking her if she owned a food processor. While she did own one, she would never have thought of using it for chopping onions. Try it; they work great. There are some things that need a more precise dice, but for the bulk of your chopping needs, a food processor suffices. Whenever you can find a shortcut, go for it.
Hosting a successful dinner requires preparation. If you have everything "put into place" (mise en place), you reduce the stress of entertaining.
Menu Example
The idea for this menu I developed a few years back came from a trip to the west coast. To say it is eclectic is probably an understatement, but that is pretty much my interpretation of California cuisine — anything.
Time and Temperature Caveat
Throughout the book time and temperature data is provided. I have always struggled with the question, How long do I cook this for? The answer is that it depends. A great example happened a few weeks ago. My daughter was cooking my Char-Roasted Ham for her in-laws. She called me panicked about two hours into the process saying it has been cooking on the grill for two hours and isn't done yet. A few questions later I learned that she, her husband and her father in law had been checking the ham every 15 minutes by lifting the grill lid. Lift the lid and lose the heat, and it could take a month to cook.
Time and temperature can be influenced by many factors:
• Oven/stovetop/grill temperatures vary.
• Opening oven/grills.
• One man's high is another man's medium.
• Moving the meat on the grill is bad. Constant flipping is worse.
The time and temperatures provided are based on research and experience. Ranges provide a safety net. Just make sure you enjoy the learning.
California Cuisine Menu
Appetizer Shrimp and Avocado Quesadillas First Course Seared Baja Beef Tenderloin with Spring Greens, Parmesan and Mustard/Horseradish Sauce Second Course Endive, Pear and Blue Cheese Salad Main Course Sesame Chilean Sea Bass with Wasabi/Soy Beurre Blanc Sauce, Asparagus and Black Rice Dessert Poached Peaches with Vanilla Ice Cream and Blueberry Compote
Shrimp and Avocado Quesadilla with Southwestern Sauce
Ingredients
1 large shallot, peeled and cut into¼-inch slices
½ cup olive oil
½ pound medium shrimp, raw, deveined and shell removed
12 10-inch flour tortillas
8 ounces Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
1 ripe avocado, peeled, pitted and cut into?-inch slices Salt and pepper to taste
1 teaspoon ancho chili powder
½ cup chopped fresh cilantro Southwestern Sauce (see page 32)
Cookware Needed
10 or 12 inch sauté (or frying) pan Baking sheet
Serves 8 people
1. In a medium sauté pan, sauté shallots in olive oil until translucent (7 minutes).
2. In the same pan, lightly sauté shrimp in olive oil until they just start to turn pink. Be careful not to overcook as you will cook them a second time when frying the quesadilla.
3. Lay out 6 tortillas.
4. Sprinkle on a layer of cheese.
5. Add shallots.
6. Add shrimp.
7. Add avocado.
8. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and chili powder.
9. Add the top tortilla.
10. On a hot skillet or grill top, add a thin layer of oil, then grill each quesadilla. Each side should be grilled for 3–5 minutes or until the tortilla becomes golden brown.
11. Cook the quesadillas in batches and transfer to a cookie sheet.
12. 20 minutes before serving, reheat the quesadillas on the cookie sheet in a 350°F oven.
13. Slice quesadillas into wedges.
14. Using a squirt bottle, add zig-zag lines of the Southwestern Sauce.
15. Sprinkle with cilantro and serve.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Impromptu Friday Nights"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Paul J. Kenny.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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