In The Kitchen
	Jeffrey S. McDonald’s recipe for fennel, sausage and cranberry stuffing
Ingredients:

		2 tablespoons butter
		1 small bulb fresh fennel, sliced thin
		1 medium onion, sliced
		2 carrots, sliced or diced
		3 stalks celery, sliced or diced
		8 ounces fresh mushrooms, quartered
		¾ pound fresh breakfast sausage
		1 cup fresh cranberries
		1 teaspoon fresh sage, chopped
		2 teaspoon kosher salt
		1 teaspoon pepper
		6 cups bread, cubed (may substitute 1 package of stuffing)
		2 large eggs, beaten
		2½ cups chicken broth
	Melt butter in large skillet. Add fennel, onion and carrots and cook until softened — about 4 minutes. Remove from pan.
	Cook sausage, reserving 2 tablespoons of fat.
	In a large bowl or roasting pan, mix all ingredients except chicken broth and eggs. Be sure to include the reserved sausage fat.
	Add eggs and half of the chicken broth. Mix well. Add additional chicken broth until mixture is moist but not soggy.
	Cover with foil and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake for an additional 20 minutes.
In The Kitchen

Jeffrey S. McDonald’s recipe for fennel, sausage and cranberry stuffing

Ingredients:
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 small bulb fresh fennel, sliced thin
  • 1 medium onion, sliced
  • 2 carrots, sliced or diced
  • 3 stalks celery, sliced or diced
  • 8 ounces fresh mushrooms, quartered
  • ¾ pound fresh breakfast sausage
  • 1 cup fresh cranberries
  • 1 teaspoon fresh sage, chopped
  • 2 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1 teaspoon pepper
  • 6 cups bread, cubed (may substitute 1 package of stuffing)
  • 2 large eggs, beaten
  • 2½ cups chicken broth

Melt butter in large skillet. Add fennel, onion and carrots and cook until softened — about 4 minutes. Remove from pan.

Cook sausage, reserving 2 tablespoons of fat.

In a large bowl or roasting pan, mix all ingredients except chicken broth and eggs. Be sure to include the reserved sausage fat.

Add eggs and half of the chicken broth. Mix well. Add additional chicken broth until mixture is moist but not soggy.

Cover with foil and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake for an additional 20 minutes.

Attorney and chef Jeffrey S. McDonald demonstrates how to make decorative chocolate accents for desserts at the America’s Baking and Sweets Show this month at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center Hotel in Schaumburg.
Attorney and chef Jeffrey S. McDonald demonstrates how to make decorative chocolate accents for desserts at the America’s Baking and Sweets Show this month at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center Hotel in Schaumburg. — Timothy M. Schmidt

Turning toward his cart, Jeffrey S. McDonald grabs a putty scraper in one hand and drywall knife in the other. The lawyer’s blue eyes light up as he shows off the tools to a crowd.

He isn’t presenting evidence in a courtroom, and it’s not a seminar on home improvement.

“I get all of my chocolate tools at Home Depot,” McDonald said. “It sounds funny, but all of the pros, the professional chocolate guys, get it from the same (type of) place. These are basically just stainless steel drywall tools.”

The introduction is part of the Di Monte & Lizak LLC partner’s chocolate accents and decorations demonstration for an audience of 20 people at the America’s Baking and Sweets Show in Schaumburg this month.

On evenings and weekends, the 56-year-old attorney trades in his suits and briefcase for a chef’s coat and spatulas as a culinary instructor at Harper College in Palatine.

Over the course of four years, he earned certificates in culinary arts and bread-and-pastry arts programs from the college. He then started a small catering business and has assisted chefs at high-profile events such as the 2009 Epcot International Food & Wine Festival in Disney World and the 2009 Les Amis d’Escoffier Society of Chicago’s spring dinner, an invitation-only black-tie event for chefs and culinary connoisseurs.

Earning the title of chef and going through the culinary program itself is no cake walk.

Students who go through the program are usually pursuing a culinary career, said Patrick Beach, a Harper College professor and the coordinator of its hospitality management program. He said it’s rare to have students like McDonald who have full-time careers in another profession complete the program just for fun.

“He was basically working a part-time job as a cook. Even in an educational environment, it’s hard,” said David Miller, a former Harper instructor and owner of catering company Chef By Request. “He was washing sinks, mopping floors and cleaning equipment.”

Flunking cookies

Nine years ago, McDonald took a knife skills course at Kendall College in Chicago. He enjoyed it so much, he started looking into other cooking classes closer to his home and found the program at Harper.

“I’ve always liked cooking,” he said. “I think it was the drive to learn the different techniques and how things were done professionally and to learn how to cook with different ingredients that most people normally don’t see.”

Taking culinary classes allowed him to express his creative side, McDonald said, and feed his passion for experimenting with ingredients and developing different flavors.

He seeks out unique ingredients that many people wouldn’t normally cook with — such as candy-stripe beets or jicama, a Mexican plant — and likes to make things from scratch, including sausage.

That curiosity worked in his favor when instructors tasked students with inventing new dishes or during basket challenges in which students got one or two ingredients and had to build a dish around them.

Steve Colella, who went through the culinary program with McDonald, said his longtime friend excelled at those tests. It resulted in creations such as squid-ink pasta and a twist on steak-and-eggs, with a parmesan crisp and an egg-washed scoop of mashed potatoes made to look like a sunny-side up egg.

“He doesn’t do what’s already been done. He failed a few times, but he never ceased to surprise me with spins on classical dishes,” Miller said. “He liked to break the boundaries of creativity even if he didn’t have it down yet.”

The first time they made cookies in class, all of the students baked in a conventional oven — except McDonald, who wanted to use a convection oven, which circulates hot air around food to cook it.

This experiment, however, didn’t go so well.

“We joke with him that he flunked cookies,” Colella said. “He burned them beyond belief.”

While McDonald also failed at his first attempt to make pepperoni, Miller said, he tried again repeatedly until he got it right.

As part of a class requirement to complete a catering or cooking job with instructors to get real-life experience, McDonald and Colella signed up to work a charity dinner. They stood on the back of a refrigerated truck, plating more than 200 salads. The door was partially closed, giving them barely any light, and the air conditioner was blasting.

This less-than-glamorous experience didn’t deter them from launching a small catering company together, We’re Booked Now Inc.

Since both work full time — Colella is in the direct-mail industry — they only take catering jobs that fit their busy schedules, typically booking small events such as graduation and birthday parties.

McDonald is the creative menu planner, Colella said, while he focuses on logistics — quantities, food cost and how much time they need to prepare before service.

Both said they don’t intend it to be a money-making venture.

“We just do it for fun,” Colella said. “We like cooking together.”

Now a Harper College instructor for four years, McDonald has taught courses on the science of cooking, international cuisine, chocolates and confections, plated desserts and charcuterie — the cooking of prepared meats.

In the science of cooking course, his syllabus included classics such as hot dogs, gyros, milkshakes and Reuben sandwiches. The class made every element of the dishes from scratch, including baking hot dog buns, pickling relish and fermenting cabbage to make sauerkraut. They also had a little fun with liquid nitrogen to make ice cream for the milkshakes.

Along with his culinary skills, Beach said, McDonald’s experience as an attorney has added another dimension to student learning. McDonald also teaches hospitality management courses, giving students a different perspective on working with corporate executives, business operations and management.

Students occasionally report that McDonald keeps them late because he is so excited to teach and show them another technique, Beach said.

“He’s a good cook,” Beach said. “In our business, if you say someone is a good cook, that’s a big compliment.”

But even with all of his chef’s credentials, McDonald is humble about his skills. His wife is still the best cook at their house, he said.

Their home kitchen is nearly professional grade, filled with kitchen gadgets such as a sous vide machine, which cooks food in a vacuum-sealed bag immersed in hot water to lock in flavors and evenly cook the food.

The couple has also developed their own home-cooking challenge, McDonald said, in which they agree not to go to the grocery store for a month and build meals out of ingredients that are already in their chest refrigerator and kitchen cabinets.

McDonald is pretty sure he’s not the best cook at his law firm, either.

“Internally, we had a chili cook-off, and I’ve got to tell you, mine was not voted the best,” he said, referring to the winner, Adam Jeorge Poteracki.

“Which is OK — a lot of people get intimidated by the fact that you’re a chef and, really, many of those people are as good or better, than I could ever be at cooking.”

Not just a baker and lawyer

Everybody has a go-to guy for taxes, computers or handyman work. McDonald is “the guy” for all of these things.

After McDonald started teaching classes at Harper, he took a welding course and is finishing his certification in heating, ventilation and air conditioning work (HVAC).

With those skills, McDonald said he found out that a humidifier in the addition to his house was never hooked up. Later on, he also identified a leak in the system.

At Di Monte & Lizak, McDonald is the firm’s lone information technology resource, managing the office’s network of 50 computers, including servers, for more than a decade.

A 1987 John Marshall Law School graduate is also a CPA with a master’s degree in taxation. His practice focuses on transactional work — corporate, tax, estate planning and probate matters as well as real estate transactions.

He previously spent about seven years as a Cook County assistant state’s attorney and prosecuted cases involving insurance fraud, embezzlement, conspiracy and high-tech crimes.

“I think that to be good at cooking, you need to have discipline and creativity,” McDonald said. “And I think that’s not so different from the practice of law.”

When Miller needed an attorney to help him negotiate a buyout agreement with a business partner eight years ago, he turned to his former student. He said McDonald brings the same enthusiasm, attention to detail and thoroughness to his legal work that he does in the kitchen.

McDonald now handles all of his corporate filings and helped him with two real estate closings. HVAC may be next.

“I told him, ‘Now I can call you on the weekends for kitchen help — and I will call you when my walk-in cooler breaks down,’” he said.

McDonald said his extracurricular pursuits are merely an opportunity to tinker with things and explore hobbies that interest him.

“I love being a lawyer, but everyone has some kind of diversion from practicing law,” he said. “This has been mine.”