Last Night's Dinner: Braciole

Traditional meals on New Year's Day seem to be, well, traditional. For many years we held with the tradition of eating black-eyed peas to give us good fortune in the coming year, even though I don't like them. Enough Crystal hot sauce made them palatable, but only barely.

We've run through some pretty lean years recently, what with the job-losing and forced moves and fire and whatnot, but all along we kept eating the black-eyed peas, thinking "geez, what would have happened if we weren't eating them?" Last year, though, we decided to forego them -- I doubt it was a conscious decision as much as a decision born of laziness and my desire to not get off the couch and drive to the store to get them -- and try something else.

We had had braciole for the first time a few weeks before, when we had Thanksgiving with D-Jo's Aunt Dee and Uncle Ernie and family. Ernie does the full-on Italian thing in the kitchen, and we arrived to a giant pot bubbling on the stove containing various meats cooking in homemade sauce (or, as he calls it, gravy). It was like that scene in the Godfather when Clemenza is cooking after they've gone to the mattresses:

"Here, learn something... you may have to feed fifty guys some day. You start with olive oil...fry some garlic,see. And then fry some sausage...or meatballs if you like...then you throw in the tomatoes, the tomato paste...some basil; and a little red wine...that's my trick."

It was like that, with enough food for fifty to feed the 15 of us. The centerpiece of the meal was a braciole, a flank steak wrapped up with a filling of bread crumbs, garlic, and herbs. It was fantastic.

(The amazing thing about this Thanksgiving was that, a few hours after the giant Italian feast, we had a full-on Thanksgiving dinner with a turkey, stuffing, potatoes, the whole nine yards. It was insane. But so, so good.)

So D-Jo decided to try a braciole on her own last New Year's Day, and it was a success. We hadn't purposely set out to make it our new traditional meal, but when she asked me last week what I wanted for New Year's dinner, I said "a roulade," and she said, "how about braciole," and bingo, a new tradition was started. 2006 (AKA Year One of the Braciole Era) turned out pretty well for us, so we're thinking this tradition is a keeper.

She started with a nice flank steak from Hummer's at the market, and basically used Alton Brown's braciole recipe, and even though it ended up garlic-free (an oversight that we can blame on the sinus infection) it was great. Look for it to end up as the centerpiece of a dinner party soon.