Who cooks for the cook?

Some consider it conventional wisdom: Never cook for a chef.

Yes, it can be intimidating. It can produce a nightmarish fear your food won’t measure up -- much like the time I served a homebrewed beer to a dear friend and professional brewer, who kindly noted I must have intended the off-flavor he detected.

But hey, I figure, who would appreciate a night off from cooking more than someone who spends most days and nights cooking for others?

So I took the plunge recently, drawing inspiration from a trip to Spain taken this summer by the chef and his wife, who runs the front of the house at their restaurant. I had made this dish, Boles de Picolat, before to serve at parties and thought it might be a nice tapas-style dish for this couple to enjoy on an off-day.

Boles de Picolat literally means “balls of ground meat,” according to Catalan food expert Colman Andrews. It is a mashup – or rollup, if you will -- of culinary influences from the autonomous Catalonia region of Spain and the French Languedoc-Roussillon region that abuts it, according to the recipe I used from Andrews’ great 1988 cookbook, “Catalan Cuisine.”

Every culture that eats meat, it seems, has some form of meatball in its repertoire. Often, the variations reflect the history of that culture. These Catalan meatballs use olives (introduced by the Phoenicians) and cinnamon (one of the lucrative spices that motivated Christopher Columbus to sail the ocean blue from Spain). The recipe obviously is post-Columbian because of the inclusion of New World foods like chile pepper and tomato.

The recipe calls for botifarra, a simply seasoned white pork sausage. But I use the house-made garlic pork sausage at Whole Foods, mixing four parts of the sausage with one part ground beef, then adding garlic, salt and pepper with egg to bind it. After rolling the mix into small meatballs, an inch round or so, and sprinkling them with flour, I brown them with some olive oil in an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven.

After the meatballs are done, the sauce is made by cooking a generous amount of onion in the same oil, scraping up the browned bits, but cooking them slowly enough to keep the onions translucent without caramelizing.

Into the pot goes a little more flour, some chopped tomatoes, sweet pepper (roasted and peeled red bell pepper), cinnamon (1.5 Tbsp. per 2 pounds of meat), smoked Spanish paprika and green olives (figure 1.5 cups per 2 pounds of meat; Andrews insists they be freshly-pitted). Next goes the browned meatballs and enough water to cover them. It should simmer, happily, for about an hour.

The meatballs are extra flavorful from the sausage and the umami caused by browning them. The olives contribute a Mediterranean glow. But it’s that dry pungency from the cinnamon that makes people say “Wow” when they try a rendition of Andrews’ Boles de Picolat.

My hard-working restaurateur friends told me later they loved the meatballs. They especially appreciated the gesture and how it provided them a little more rest and relaxation to go with the gustatory pleasure.

Taking a culinary risk like that can be nerve-wracking. But the payoff for success is both immensely satisfying and confidence-building.

And frankly, it doesn’t even matter if you bomb. No one worth knowing would be anything but appreciative for your truly heartfelt gesture.