Marisa Catalano is sitting pretty. Not only does she help run the upscale Italian wine bar enoteca—an opportunity she calls “priceless” for a 29-year-old culinary school grad like herself—she lives in an apartment with a killer view of Carter Mountain, Charlottesville and the hills beyond. When she moved here from New York a year and a half ago, she says, she pictured her new Charlottesville life taking place in some cute little house. But she ended up in this rather new, third-floor apartment—“cookie-cutter,” in her words, but admittedly boasting tons of storage, a balcony and other pluses that cute little houses might not.
And there’s the kitchen. We asked if we could poke around in Catalano’s cooking space because we figured the young chef, who also teaches classes at The Seasonal Cook, would have some strong opinions about how a kitchen should be arranged and appointed. Though it’s a rental she walked into and not a dream kitchen she designed, Catalano says her kitchen—with its diagonal bar opening into the living room and big windows near the pantry—works well. “I feel like whoever designed this kitchen put thought into it,” she says. “It’s good flow.” When she has people over, they can sit at the counter stools and feel involved in the cooking—to a point. “I usually say, you stay on this side and I’m over here. My boyfriend tells me he can see the look in my eye when he’s in the way.”
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Though Catalano has a roster of tools she considers indispensable (which you can peruse on page 19), she’s not a gear hound, rarely using even her toaster and microwave. “I remember that when I graduated from culinary school my mom bought me this big basket of all these gadgets,” she says. “Shrimp deveiners, egg prickers, all these crazy things. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had just spent $25,000 on cooking school so that I could not use any of those things. You learn to do everything with your knife.” A 10" Wüsthof chef’s knife tops her list of essentials. And she raves about her Le Creuset cookware, for braising and making stews, and her stainless steel sauté pan with a handle that’s oven-safe.
For Catalano, the love of food runs deep—through her childhood in Lynchburg and beyond to her parents’ Italian-American roots in Brooklyn. “We would go to New York for the holidays and there was such a drastic difference between food I would eat up there and the food I would eat down here,” she says. “I remember being absolutely in awe that olives had pits! It was life-changing.” But Southern cuisine made its mark too; when it came to an appreciation for grits and collard greens, her Brooklyn relatives “had no idea what we were talking about. I didn’t realize until I was older how much that difference in cuisines had affected my own personal food philosophy.”
After college, living in New York and working as a server and bartender, she decided to enroll in the Institute of Culinary Education, even though she still thought of cooking more as a hobby than a career. “I fell into really appreciating that you could make a life for yourself with this,” she says. Since then she’s worked on hot lines in restaurants, as a food stylist for television and in cookware shops. Back in June, she and her partner Megan Headley—backed by Coran Capshaw—opened enoteca, where Italian wines and simple little dishes reign supreme. There Catalano does everything from cook to pour.
At home, of course, things are simpler. “This summer we did a lot of eating out,” she says, but now she’s getting back into a cooking routine. “It’s amazing how when I’ve been away from cooking for myself and get back to it, I make that realization again of how much I enjoy it,” she says. Compared with New York, living in Charlottesville makes it easy to think seasonally. “Here there’s more of a sense of agriculture and the rhythm of how food grows,” she says. Current cravings for fall? Apples, butternut squash and the escarole soup, adapted from her mother’s recipe, see below.
Marisa’s Escarole Soup with Turkey Meatballs
Marisa likes to make his great cool-weather soup in her Le Creuset Dutch oven. She made it alongside her mom as a kid—“Little hands are good for rolling little meatballs,” she says—and claims she’s still trying to make it taste as good as her mom’s did. We’re betting Marisa’s version is just dandy.
For the soup:
2 Tbs. extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. rosemary, minced
1/4 tsp. red pepper flake
1 head escarole, trimmed, washed and chopped into bite-sized pieces
6 cups chicken stock (homemade or low-sodium boxed)
salt, to taste
freshly ground black pepper, to taste
For the meatballs:
1/2 pound ground turkey
1/4 cup plain bread crumbs
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/2 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1 Tbs. finely chopped oregano
1 Tbs. finely chopped basil
1 Tbs. finely chopped parsley
1/2 tsp. salt
freshly ground black pepper, to taste
For the Parmesan crisps:
1 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
On the side:
1 loaf crusty Italian bread
In a Dutch oven, heat oil over medium heat. Add the onions and sauté until slightly golden; add the garlic, rosemary and red pepper flake and continue to sauté for two-three more minutes. Add the escarole and stir until wilted, season with salt and pepper; add the chicken stock. Bring to a boil then reduce heat and simmer.
Combine the meatball ingredients in a mixing bowl. With your hands, thoroughly mix the ingredients together. Make small meatballs by rounding about a tablespoon of the mixture in your hands. As you make the meatballs, drop them into the simmering soup. Once you have added all the meatballs, cook eight-10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Preheat oven to 350°. On a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil, make six small piles of grated cheese. Bake until the cheese is completely melted and begins to brown around the edges. Remove and let cool.
Garnish each bowl of soup with a Parmesan crisp and serve with crusty Italian bread. Serves six.
Marisa’s top tools
1. Wüsthof 10" chef’s knife
“The most important thing is my knives. I’m a Wüsthof girl. We got a set of Wüsthofs with our culinary school kit. I just kind of have become accustomed to those and stuck with them. I use a 10"; the 12" is a little bit long for me and a little more unwieldy.”
2. Le Creuset cookware
“Le Creuset is some of the best cookware that I’ve used. Not only because of the cooking quality it gives you but also it’s so easy to clean. It’ll last me forever; I’ll be able to hand it down to my children. It’s cast iron but it’s enameled on the outside. It’s nonstick but you’re getting the heat retention of a cast-iron pot.”
3. Microplane
“It’s got these really fine divets with blades, and they have some sort of design that makes them extremely sharp—and they stay really sharp. I use it mostly for zesting things—lemon and orange—but you can also use it to grate cheese.”
4. Larousse Gastronomique
“This was actually the gift that the culinary school gave us for graduation. It is primarily French. This is an encyclopedia of everything—foods, cooking techniques, equipment, everything. That is the book I go to when I’m curious about anything or need to refresh my memory. Megan and I gave this to our cook last year when he turned 21; we saw there was that spark in him of wanting to learn more and he was always sitting and reading—magazines, cookbooks, whenever there was a down minute he was reading something. He was over the moon about it.”
5. Butter
“With the butter I usually buy Breakstone; I’m not sure why. If I’m feeling a little sassy I’ll buy Palugra, which is a better quality and higher fat content.”
6. Stainless-steel sauté pan
“This is a restaurant quality pan. I was looking to buy new pans, and I wanted ones that had handles that could go in the oven. I do a lot of sauté-it-on-the-stovetop and finish-it-in-the-oven.”
7. Tongs
“Tongs are an extension of my arm. Being efficient with tongs was something I learned cooking on a hot line in a restaurant. I do everything with them—pulling things out of water if I’m blanching asparagus, or if I’m sautéing spinach and I want to turn it in the pan, folding over the leaves as they start to wilt.”
8. Le Saunier de Camargue salt
“I usually keep some sea salt or fleur de sel or something with a little bit more texture. You can see how coarse those grains are, for finishing, or if I want to add a little crunch at the end. I also have a tendency to pick up truffle salt, lavender salt, garlic salt…”
9. Vintage cookbook, Fine Old Dixie Recipes
“Someone my mom knows had a collection of these; they’re wooden and really old. They have these crazy old recipes—jellied mélange, diamondback terrapin stew. …I’ve been working on biscuits lately, and so I’ve been trying different ones, and I did try one out of this Dixie cookbook. It was weird because they wanted me to use lard and I substituted Crisco, which is something I try not to use that often. They didn’t come out quite how I had expected them to.”
Pro picks
Her luxury items: “I have a thing for old tools and cookbooks. It’s the culture of cooking that I’m into. I’m never going to be able to read all of this, but I do use them as reference material.”
Her budget find: A vintage Oster mixer. “I don’t bake very often so I don’t use my mixer very much. But I found that in a secondhand store for 18 bucks. I would love to have a Kitchenaid, but there’s something about that one that I just can’t let go of. It’s like a big hand mixer. It works great.”
Ingredient she’s never without: Kosher salt. “[In cooking school,] they teach you to salt every step of the way. Every time you add an ingredient, salt and pepper. My father told me when I finished cooking school that I was too heavy-handed with it! I have found an in between, where I feel like it’s enough to bring out the flavors I’m looking for without being overwhelming.”
Another essential: Butter. “I always have probably at least a pound or more in here. Always unsalted, because that’s an element that I want to control.”
Favorite task: “I think I always have enjoyed prepping. [At enoteca] I was quartering cherry tomatoes and my cook Andrew said, ‘That sucks, doesn’t it?’ But there’s something about the repetition that is soothing or calming in a way.”
Least favorite task: “What I hate is the dishes. I do have a dishwasher. It comes in handy but I never put my knives in the dishwasher, and I don’t like to put my cookware in the dishwasher because it’s usually pretty heavily soiled. I’m still working on the boyfriend to pick up on the dishes.”
How she shops: “I’ve gotten in the habit of doing per-meal shopping—a dinner and a breakfast. I find that helps me not lose stuff.”
Where she shops: “Wednesdays I’ve been hitting the Meade Park farmer’s market, which I’m so thrilled about because I’m not a morning person. Saturday mornings after a long night at the restaurant, it’s been rough to get over to that farmer’s market, so I’m really glad that they have another one. …[Also], I’m amazed by the things I can find in the local Giant.”
What she’d have in her dream kitchen: “Now that I know more about wine and have a higher appreciation for it, I would invest in a [wine cooler] that would be able to keep the whites chilled at the right temperature.” Oh, and a bigger sink. Oh—and she thinks outdoor kitchens are pretty sweet. But “that’s way beyond even my wildest dreams at this point.”
