At the moment, I don’t have any pictures or video of the preparation, but perhaps I can add that in the next week or so, when I make another batch. For right now, I’ll post the text so you can take a shot at making it. I would love to hear your comments about how yours turns out!

I’m not hard-core enough to make my own sausages yet, so I use Perri Hot Italian Sausages. But any good quality Italian sausage will do. All the hot-and-spicy in this sauce comes from the sausages. So if you don’t like spicy, switching to a sweet Italian sausage should work just fine.

Meatballs

• 1 pound 80-85% lean ground beef
• 1/2 cup Italian style breadcrumbs
• 2 eggs
• 3 cloves garlic finely chopped
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• Salt, pepper to taste (I use none)

Sauce

• Olive oil from browning meat
• 1 lb hot Italian sausages (sweet also ok if you don’t like spicy)
• 1 medium onion finely chopped
• 3 cloves garlic finely chopped
• 1 1/2 teaspoons dried basil or 1/4 cup fresh chopped basil
• 2 – 28 oz cans crushed tomatoes
• 1-2 cups “starter” sauce. I use leftovers from previous batch or some bottled sauce.
• Salt, pepper to taste

Procedure

1. In small pot boil water and par-boil the sausage for about 10 or 15 minutes. When done, remove from water and dry excess water from casing. Save the water!!
2. In a bowl combine the meatball ingredients and mix with your hands until smooth and consistent. Be sure to squish the meat thoroughly. Roll into meatballs about the size of a golf ball. Cover and set aside.
3. In large frying pan or skillet cover the bottom with a good amount of olive oil and brown the meatballs and sausages on all sides.
4. Remove browned meat from skillet and set aside.
5. Pour oil from frying meat into a large sauce pot and heat.
6. When oil is hot, pour chopped onion in and cook until soft and translucent.
7. Add basil and garlic and stir well for a couple of minutes. (This onion, garlic, basil mixture smells great, by the way!)
8. Add the two cans of crushed tomatoes and heat until bubbling, but be careful not to overheat and cause sticking, burning on the pot bottom.
9. Add the sausage and meatballs and stir thoroughly.
10. Add the starter sauce.
11. Simmer for 1-2 hours, stirring occasionally, add saved sausage boiling water in small amounts to keep at the desired consistency.
12. Tastes best if chilled overnight in the refrigerator before using.

I responded with a string of tweets, about how restaurants should put their actual street address in a prominent place so I can enter it into my car GPS navigation system, and also to use regular HTML text (as opposed to a pretty image) so I can copy it easily. I also went off on “fake FAQs” that have softball questions written by the marketing department as a contrived way to push their message. For instance, “How does your restaurant have such consistently awesome food?”

Poor Todd. He had unknowingly triggered one of my hot buttons about business web sites, which is that a company’s site should be about customer service, not marketing. To me, it’s the simplest way to keep in mind the proper design approach and overall goal of the site.

One of my favorite quotes (author unknown) on this topic is, “Please. Just help me. Don’t make me endure the sales process.” I’m sure this will resonate with anyone who has been frustrated trying to find the simplest, most mundane piece of information on a over-wrought, cutesy, Flashy web site that was clearly designed by an agency accustomed to creating TV commercials or print ads.

It’s not about what you want to say, it’s about what they want to know.

As a restaurant owner, I’m sure you want to tell me about all the great things you have to offer, from drinks, appetizers, to decor. But often that’s not what I need to know. When I’m going to a restaurant, I want to know things like:

Where are you? Give me a real street address for my GPS system. If it’s in a crowded city location, give me some landmarks nearby so I can find the entrance. And as Jon Silk said, a Google maps link, not some cutesy schematic map.

Parking. This is huge one for me. If you have on-site parking, SAY SO! If you don’t, tell me where I can park without getting ticketed or towed. Tell me where the most affordable, accessible lot is nearby. Give me pictures of them, so I can find them easily. Don’t make me first double park outside, run inside, ask you where, and then have to go out again.

Dietary options. Are you vegetarian or vegan friendly? Or conversely, for veggie-oriented places, do you accommodate carnivores? How about gluten or lactose sensitivities? Do you use MSG? The list goes on. Know your customer base and let them know what to expect.

Busy/Slack time. Of course restaurants want their places packed all the time. Some actually enjoy that status, but most places have slack time. Personally, I prefer going at quieter times, when I can have a little privacy, talk and perhaps get better service. Rather than people be frustrated having wait an hour for a table, let them know when it’s quieter. You might even out your traffic and get more business overall.

Seating options. Does your restaurant have features like a child-friendly or adults-only section? (I’d LOVE an adults-only section, by the way). Handicapped access should go without saying, but provide details, if necessary. Older buildings sometimes have to use alternate entrances or elevators.

The more real-time, the better…

Nothing’s worse than an out-of-date site with stale information. I’ve actually seen sites lately with the wrong address after they’ve relocated, or bios of the former owners still up.

The ultimate is real-time information. I want to jump on a chat or be able to send a Tweet to a restaurant and ask them a question if their site doesn’t already provide it. I think a lot of people are like me and have grown to detest using a telephone to get customer service. I don’t like being tethered to a handset while  being on hold, or getting a sales pitch (live or recorded) or having to deal with some officious hostess who acts like she’s doing you a favor to talk to you.

How about an accurate wait-time, or even perhaps web-cams, so I can see what’s going on? Give people a Twitter hash tag to use so they can tweet while they’re there. If you love your customers and treat them right, they’ll do right by you, too. And it will give you a real-time sense of what kind of experience people are having, while they’re there, so you can do something about it!

FAQs that aren’t faux

Every restaurant manager knows the questions people ask and what they want to know. Just answer those questions. Ok, you may want to shy away from the last three health department citations you got, but if that’s the kind of place you’re running, this advice won’t help you much.

So, don’t look at your website as just another advertising or promotion medium. Use it to really help your customers and they’ll love you for it!

Ingredients

1 sm. shallot, chopped finely

4 1/2 Tblspoons butter

3 tsps tarragon

Asparagus tips (1 bunch)

1 can diced tomatoes, drained

3/4 cup heavy cream (don’t subsitute light cream, it will curdle)

1 1/4 cup lobster stock (not bottled clam juice)

1/2 cup dry white wine

Meat of 2 1-1/4 lb lobsters, chopped

1/3 lb. small scallops

1 can crabmeat

1 box spinach fettucini

Salt, pepper to taste

Procedure:

1. Cook shallots in butter 3 mins.

2. Add tomatoes and tarragon, increasing heat to high so tomatoes lose some of their moisture.

3. Add the lobster stock, cream and wine and continue boiling until sauce has reduced.

4. Add salt, pepper to taste.

5.Reduce heat, stir in seafood and already steamed asparagus tips. Cook 2 mins. until meat is hot.

6. Serve over spinach fettucini.

In honor of July 4th, Independence Day, I am going to school all of you in the preparation of a proper New England Lobster Roll. To the visitor to New England (“from away” as you’re known here) I will warn you that there are dining establishments that claim to serve lobster rolls, but most are merely pretenders, poseurs. They serveth not the True, the Honest, the Original Lobster Roll, but merely a tawdry, cheap imitation. Beware, I say! Read here a description of an Authentic New England Lobster Roll and be not cheated! Or better yet, make your own and enjoy them at a third the price!

Ok, so I went on a bit there, but you get the point. I’m going to give you instructions on making a real lobster roll, like we enjoyed as kids here in New England before lobster became a delicacy in Japan and lobster meat became so expensive (like $40/lb) that restaurants began to find ways to cut it, add fillers and otherwise cheapen one of America’s most delicious summer treats.

Ingredients:

1. Lobster meat. You can make six well-packed lobster rolls with two 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 pound live lobsters. Or you can buy about 1 pound of pre-picked lobster meat, which will cost you dearly, chummy. Now right here I want to emphasize that a True Lobster Roll is filled with only lobster meat, not some abomination of Lobster Salad, which has celery, gobs of salad dressing, and god knows what other fillers in it so it ends up being cheaper to make. No. Use lobster and only lobster.

2. The Roll. If at all possible, use a New England style hot-dog roll, which is different from the rolls you may find elsewhere. These are known in cooking circles (thank you Grace Piper..) as a “top-loader”. Take a look at the first picture in the post. Notice that the roll stands up with the slit at the top through the toasted upper surface. It does not lay on its side.

3. Melted butter and mayo. What is lobster without melted butter? In a lobster roll, the butter is drizzled over the top of the lobster when in the roll. Optionally, one can coat the inside of the roll with a little mayonnaise for flavor, but for god’s sake don’t go overboard here, ok?

That’s it. It’s as simple as dirt and much better tasting.

Process:

1. If you’re working with live lobsters (much preferable) get a large pot of water to a rolling boil and throw the lobsters in. Cook for 10 minutes after the water begins to boil again. Remove from water, drain and let cool. You can get a bad burn from the residual water left inside the shell. Make sure they’re really cooled.

2. Break the lobsters apart and extract all the meat you can. I use a meat cleaver as a broad plate to break down the claws and knuckles (ie, the claw joints). Be careful to keep bits of broken shell out of the meat. Chop the tails into small enough pieces to fit in the rolls. The picture shows what two lobsters will yield in pure meat. Don’t bother too much with the bodies, as there isn’t enough meat in there to justify the time required to extract it. The bodies can be used to make a great lobster tomato sauce, so you can save them for that if you want.

3. Coat the sides of the rolls with butter and grill them on a skillet to a golden brown. This is a touchstone of a real lobster roll: the butter-grilled roll.

4. If you like mayo, spread a small amount on the inside of the roll, then fill the rolls with the lobster and serve with chips, and maybe some corn on the cob as we did today. They’re always good with beer, although my wife and daughter drank champagne with theirs today. I tried a little and it was excellent!!

My recipe tends to be more old school, and includes no tomatoes, only meat, onions, chili peppers, jalapenos, a bit of sweet pepper and spices. Here it is:

Joe’s Exothermic Chili

Serves approx. 8

Ingredients

• 2 lbs. stew beef
• 1 lb. hot Italian sausage. I use Perri’s.
• 1 small can diced green chilis
• 1 small can sliced jalapenos
• 1 sweet pepper
• 1 good-sized onion
• 1 1/2 tbsp brown sugar
• 4 – 6 tbsp chili powder
• 2 tbsp cumin
• Olive oil
• 1 can red kidney beans
• (optional) 2 cloves garlic
• (optional) 1 – 2 tbsp Masa harina (southwest corn flour, NOT corn meal)

Directions:

1. Grind or dice stew beef into small pieces. I use a Cuisinart for this.
2. Remove casings from sausages
3. Mince onions, sweet pepper
4. If you use garlic, mince the cloves
5. Cover bottom of a large sauce pot with a generous amount of olive and heat.
6. Add garlic, onions, sweet pepper and diced green chilis
7. If jalapenos are in vinegar, wash them off with cold water before adding add to pot
8. Cook vegetables until onions are soft
9. Break sausage meat into small pieces and add to pot. Break up as much as possible using cooking spoon.
10. Add minced/diced beef
11. Cover and cook on low heat for at least 45 minutes, stirring often, until fat and juices are generated, making a stew-like mixture. This much meat should generate enough liquid to almost cover the meat and other ingredients
12. Add chili powder and cumin. Broth should turn a dark reddish-brown color.
13. Cover and let simmer, stirring occasionally for at least another hour.
14. Add masa harina slowly to achieve desired thickness.
15. Test for taste, add brown sugar slowly to taste, add more chili or cumin if necessary, or tabasco to desired heat level.
16. Add beans, let simmer until bubbling again.
17. Serve with shredded jack cheese and/or sour cream garnish.

Like any stew-type dish, it really benefits from spending a night in the refrigerator so the flavors blend nicely.

A while back, I posted a video blog entry of my chili-making process. Here it is:

Enjoy!!