Dinner with Chef Barbara Lynch at Osteria in Philadelphia

Chef Barbara Lynch, a James Beard award-winning chef and owner of several top food establishments in Boston, is not only a terrific cook, but a really nice person too. Last night I had the wonderful opportunity to meet Barbara here in Philadelphia at Marc Vetri, Jeff Michaud and Jeff Benjamin’s Osteria as a kickoff to the upcoming Alex’s Lemonade Stand Great Chefs Event that I will be sponsoring again this year. I will be writing more about this great event where more than 30 top chefs from around the country each put out a tasting dish for people to sample and raise money for Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation.

Last night’s event was to introduce Barbara Lynch to some of the sponsors of the Great Chefs Event by presenting 10 recipes from her new cookbook called Stir - Mixing It Up In The Italian Tradition. The food was incredible! And the wines Jeff Benjamin paired with the food were also fantastic.

Before the speeches and dining began, my wife and I along with her colleague Alan and his wife Michelle had an opportunity to speak with Chef Lynch about Boston and the farmers she works with to supply local meats, cheeses and produce to her restaurants. You could tell by listening to her the importance these farmers are to her success and her dedication to keep them thriving.

Talking Butchers

We talked about the need for more local butchers in cities and small towns alike. Chef Lynch told us she buys her beef locally and butchers it up in her restaurants rather than buying preprocessed cuts. I told Chef Lynch about my experiences growing up in a small town in northern New Jersey where we had a local butcher my mother would take us to a couple of times a week to purchase meat for dinner.

I’ll never forget watching the butcher open the big walk-in refrigerator door and seeing a couple sides of beef hanging from a hook. You just don’t see that anymore. Meat now comes to the supermarket trimmed, processed and cryovaced from who knows where. I noticed on Chef Lynch’s website, she has The Butcher Shop, both a neighborhood wine bar and full service butcher shop. How cool is that?

It was wonderful opportunity to meet Chef Lynch. I hope to be able to interview her for my Novice2Pro cooking segment to learn more about her culinary adventures and maybe ask her to share some cooking tips and advice with my readers.

Stir

Barbara was gracious to offer everyone at the dinner a signed copy of her new cookbook, Stir.  After looking at it for a couple of hours when I got home from the event, as stuffed as I was, I can highly recommend you go out and purchase it.

Every dish we enjoyed last night is in her new book and I can say from first hand experience, they are all terrific. Not only are the recipes accessible for home cooks to prepare, the ingredients are readily available in most supermarkets. And the photography in the book is beautiful. Much better than the ones I took with my little pocket camera shown here.

The Meal

Each dish was served family style to the tables of 8. We didn’t know the folks we were sitting with but by the time the night was over you would have thought we were old friends. The food was served on large oval platters and we passed around plates to serve each other.

Jeff Benjamin, owner and wine expert, matched the food with the wine perfectly. As you will see, the wine (and one beer) may not be all that familiar to many of you but are worth seeking out.

I’m not a food critic so I’m not going to try to describe each dish. Buy the cookbook and let Chef Lynch tell you a story about each recipe. What I would like to do is just give you a listing of what we were served and you can decide if this is something you would like to prepare at home. I know I will be.

Stuzzicchini (Italian for appetizer)

• Baked cheese and tomatoes with black olive crisps
• Ham and cheese puff pastry bites
• Served with Scarpetta, Pinot Grigio delle Venezie I.G.T 2008

1st

• Roasted eggplant with raisin pine nut vinaigrette and feta cheese
• Bibb lettuce with Parmesan dressing and cheese cialde (wafer)
• Served with Yard Saison Beer (Philadelphia, PA)

2nd

• Rigatoni with spicy sausage and cannellini beans
• Cheese agnolotti with celery, apple and prosciutto
• Served with Bastianich, Rosato Venezia Giulia I.G.T 2008

3rd

• Cornish hen cacciatore with creamy polenta
• Wood oven baked Todd with chorizo and claim ragout
• Served Casa Girelli, Primitivo Puglia I.G.T. 2006

4th

• Yogurt panna cotta
• Creamy vanilla bread pudding (the best I’ve ever had)
• Served with Librandi, “Le Passule” Vino Passito, Val di Neto I.G.T 2007

Many Thanks

It was an amazing night and I can’t wait to see Chef Lynch again along with the other great chefs who will be at the Great Chefs Event in June.  Thanks to Barbara Lynch, Jeff Benjamin, Marc Vetri, the Vetri Foundation and the entire kitchen staff at Osteria for a great night of food and wine. And a special thanks to the entire wait staff last night - the service were perfect.

On Reading A Recipe - “Turn off the television, don’t answer the phone, just sit and read it through. Make a mental inventory of the sort of equipment you need, the cooking techniques required, the ingredients you have on hand. Note the stages of preparation, and get a sense of appropriate timings.”

This is the kind of sage advice you find in Lauren Braun Costello’s new book called Notes on Cooking - A Short Guide to an Essential Craft.  The quote above comes from her chapter on Understanding the Recipe and is exactly the advice I try to give my readers at The Reluctant Gourmet web site and the Reluctant Gourmet blog all the time. Lauren just says it a little more succinctly than I do.

This is not a book full of wordy chapters but instead there are 217 short “notes on cooking”, like above, each filled with culinary insight that can help you be a better home cook. Here’s another one I like in The Cook’s Role chapter:

“Work from your Strength. Don’t try to master everything. Become known for a few dishes, perhaps even the near perfection of one. Discover your obsession, then make yourself a slave to it: the mastery of a traditional dish, the combination of ingredients that have never before met, precision in presentation, devotion to a culinary heritage, the introduction of color where it never before existed..”

Isn’t that just great advice?

The other 215 “notes” are broken down in categories titled:

• Tools & Equipment
• Procurement & Storage
• Mise en Place
• Building Blocks
• Temperature
• Pantry
• Stocks & Sauces
• Produce
• Seafood
• Poultry
• Meat
• Bread & Pastry
• Dairy & Eggs
• Wine & Spirits
• Repairing Food
• Presentation

The author, Lauren Braun Costello, developed her skills under some of the world’s most renowned chefs and is now a private chef and food stylist for television shows including The Early Show, The View and CNN’s dLife.

Lauren is a graduate of from The French Culinary Institute where she received a Grand Diploma in Culinary Arts with distinction and was awarded a Les Dames d’Escoffier Scholarship. Boy do I hope Lauren reads this and wants to be interviewed for my Novice2Pro page.

Dorothy Hamilton, the founder and CEO of The French Culinary Institute in New York City, wrote the Afterword. It’s short, just like the “notes” Lauren presents us, but if you are a foodie like me, her words will hit home.

In the marketing material sent to me with Notes On Cooking, Chef Lauren says, “There is a bounty of exceptionally good recipes out there. But the best recipes alone do not teach much. They just outline a procedure. We wanted to fill the gap. We wanted each reader to turn to any page in our book, follow any one of the notes and become a better, wiser, more skilled cook.”

I like that.

The reviews for Notes On Cooking come from some pretty big names in the industry.

• Jacques Pepin says, “Concise, focused and sensible…full of useful advice.”
• Chef Daniel Boulud says “Indispensable advice, experience, and know-how. A superb addition to the library of any passionate cook.”
• One of my favorite cookbook authors, James Peterson says “An abundance of tips, ideas and caveats. the list of food adjectives is one I’ll refer to myself and the list of recommendations is indispensable. the food airings are the most insightful I’ve ever seen. Work well done.”

Not bad press from the heavy hitters of the culinary industry.  Me, I keep a copy on my bed stand so I can read a few “notes” each night before going to sleep so I have dreams about cooking.

Let me leave you with one more “note” from Notes On Cooking -

On Repairing Foods

Dull Food? - “Brighten with acid or salt. Enrich with fat. Restaurants use animal fat and salt to enhance flavor. Vinegar, lemon jice, finishing oils, butter, and sugar are also old standbys.”

Il Viaggio di Vetri: A Culinary Journey, by Marc Vetri

I have not been this excited about a new cookbook in quite awhile. I was at the bookstore and noticed Marc Vetri’s new cookbook, Il Viaggio di Vetri, A Culinary Journey. I know of Chef Vetri through the reputation of his two very successful and popular restaurants here in Philadelphia, Vetri and Osteria.

For the past two years, I have had the opportunity to attend charity events for Alex’s Lemonade Stand, organized by Chef Vetri and hosted at Osteria. I have written about the event in past blogs, and it is always an incredible evening.

Chef Vetri invites his chef friends from around the country to each prepare a dish for the attendees to sample. You get the opportunity to try the most amazing food and speak with the chefs who have created the dishes. This year, I even had the opportunity to meet Chase Utley, the shortstop for the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies. Next year I hope to meet Chef Vetri, tell him how much his cookbook inspires me and see if he will do a Novice2Pro interview.

Chef Vetri has been named one of the top 10 new chefs in the United States by the editors of Food and Wine, and his first restaurant, Vetri, was selected as one of the top 50 restaurants in the country by Gourmet Magazine in 2006. Alan Richman wrote in a 2005 issue of Bon Appetit that Vetri is “probably the best Italian restaurant in America.”

Incredible Photography

What caught my eye was the size and cover of Il Viaggio. It has a photograph of Chef Vetri in his whites with a bunch of other chefs. Everyone is smiling as if someone is telling a funny story. When you open the book, before you read one word of copy, you can’t help but notice the incredible photography.

In the front of the book and spread throughout are photos of different chefs who have influenced Chef Vetri. You can see just from the pictures the bonds that were created while he was in Bergamo, Italy honing his craft. When it comes to the recipes, the photographs look so good you want to stick a fork in them. But, while beautiful enough for a coffee table book, Il Viaggio di Vetri is meant to be used.

Introduction

Most of the time when I pick up a cookbook, I immediately go to the recipes and look through them for something I might want to cook. When I picked up this cookbook, I immediately went to the introduction and read the first paragraph. When Chef Vetri writes about food perception and how it affects what we think about a meal, I was hooked. I started reading the Wine Notes by Jeff Benjamin and then the short biographies of the other chefs who influenced Marc.

I then checked out the recipes and realized these are the types of recipes I want to learn how to make. I love Italian cooking, and this book includes incredible recipes for appetizers, pastas, risotto, seafood, meats, poultry, game and desserts. Although many of the ingredients, including Chef Vetri’s use of organ meats, may be new to you, he typically offers alternatives for those hard-to-find items.

What really impressed me about these recipes is their simplicity and elegance. Simple ingredients combined in spectacular ways through cooking methods that Chef Vetri takes the time to teach is a hallmark of Il Viaggio di Vetri. Each recipe offers detailed, step-by-step instructions learned during the chef’s training in Italy.

I said to my wife when I was showing her this cookbook, "I would like to work my way through this book and make every recipe from cover to cover." I imagine if I did, my cooking skills would vastly improve.

My First Attempt

When I got the book home, I made an adapted version of his pork rib and cabbage stew recipe. It was one of the best meals I’ve ever prepared, and I will post it later this week. It was one of those comfort foods that are perfect on a cold weekend night with a glass of red wine. I could see serving this dish at a dinner party for a group of friends.

I can’t wait to try his Pecorino Crusted Lamb with Peas and Mint or Grilled Rib Eye Steak with Heirloom Tomato Salad or Grilled Chicken with Crispy Potatoes and Braised Escarole.

Each recipe offers a little story or history about the recipe, and suggestions for improvisation and wine pairings. Because many of the ingredients may be a little difficult to find, the “improv” is very helpful. If you can’t find squab, try guinea hens or even chicken.

This is a cookbook that you can really learn from. Whether you follow the recipe exactly as it is written or adapt it to the ingredients available to you, by following Chef Vetri’s techniques, you can learn a lot about how to cook. I highly recommend you check out Il Viaggio di Vetri as soon as possible. It will make a great gift this holiday season for any of your favorite cooking fans.

For more of my favorite cookbooks.