Tim Ryan, head chef at Consiglio's, is one of those pre-measurers, though he says he does it himself. When you're watching him in action at Consiglio's Gourmet Club dinners, a dinner and wine series in which you oversee the preparation of your four-course Italian meal, you look around the room for smoke and mirrors and Doug Henning. It looks too easy.

Ryan's recipe for baked fresh mozzarella, for instance, doesn't even require that you blend the ingredients. You just bread the cheese, put it on a pan, place the other stuff around it, and bake it until the cheese starts to melt. Or rather, he does. You get a hot serving of it, and the recipe (delicious) is suddenly much harder to forget. Crushed garlic, plum tomatoes, white wine, butter, lemon, anchovy. Nice. I did that from memory. Ryan prepared three more courses for the November 29 meeting: farfalle in an herbed tomato sauce, filet of sole and shrimp Florentine, and chocolate mousse cake. Our group, this time a private party, followed along with our recipe handouts and blurted occasional wisecracks like "Sure, it looks easy when people pre-measure everything for you," and "Where did you get those cute little white dishes?" Along the way, Ryan offered helpful cooking hints, like grinding dried herbs with your fingers as you add them to the sauce, or storing your stock in ice cube trays.

As the evening progressed, the room's volume increased suspiciously in proportion to the pourings of oenophile Paul Jaronko of the wine distributor Hartley Parker, who doled out generous portions of wine from the vineyards of Sonoma County, California. Each course was accompanied by a vintage selected to evoke the food's undertones, which in turn brought out new subtleties in the wine. The dinner was a success, preordained like a dish made with pre-measured ingredients, lasting in all of our memories like a recipe we can take home with us.