Osso Buco is a dish from northern Italy, more particularly the Lombardy region where Milan is the capital. It is often served with risotto, but you can serve it with buttered noodles, mashed potatoes, polenta or even cheese grits.  The dish is simple and straightforward to make. In fact, here are the instructions from the web site LacucinaItaliana.com:

Cut the outer lining of the meat, removing some of the internal connective tissue without breaking it.
Finely chop the white onion,  carrot, and celery. Brown the vegetables with ½ stick butter until lightly colored (for about 10 minutes). Lightly flour and salt the ossobuco meat slices. Transfer to the saucepan with the vegetables and turn up the heat until browned – take care not to burn the vegetables. Add the wine and let it evaporate for 7-8 minutes. Add pepper and meat stock, lower the heat, cover, and cook for about 1½ hours, turning the meat every once in a while. If necessary, add more broth to keep the meat moist.

Gremolata – or gremolada in dialect – is a green sauce that’s traditionally served with ossobuco. It consists of mixing ½ minced clove of garlic with a handful of chopped parsley and the grated rind of a small lemon. Mixing with a mortar and pestle really helps extract flavor. Otherwise, use the back of a spoon to press down on the ingredients in a bowl. Only use the yellow part of the lemon peel as the white pulp is too bitter for the sauce. Once the meat has finished cooking, it should be tender enough that it falls off the bone. Make sure the gremolata is mixed well and pour over the cooked meat. Let the meat and gremolata blend for one more minute. Serve warm.

How easy is that?  I have made this dish for years and it is really a no-recipe kind of dish.  You can use red or white wine, and you can use chicken or beef stock. (I do not recommend a combination of red wine and chicken stock, however).  Here is what you need to know:

1.Get the right cut of meat.  You want a veal shank that is not so huge that it will take half a day to cook and not so thin that it dries out.  Get one that is about 1 1/2 inches thick.  The Serious Eats web site says: Shanks that are one to one and a half inches thick are just big enough to provide each person with a perfect serving size, and they don’t take an eternity to reach tenderness, like larger ones do.  You can also tie a piece of twine around each shank to keep them from falling apart as they braise.  If you are serving this dish to guests, it might be a good idea to tie them – just be sure to remove the string before you plate them!

2.Have a good stock to braise the shanks.  Some purists insist that this should be chicken stock.  Traditionally, the Milanese use chicken stock (and so does Ina Garten).  However, many recipes call for beef stock.  Generally, I use beef stock because if I have homemade stock in my freezer, it is usually a beef stock.  Obviously, the choice of stock will impart a different flavor to the veal. In this case, I had a really rich delicious beef stock (“jelly”) in my freezer so that is what I used, and it was delicious.

3.Take care with prepping and cutting your vegetables.  Didn’t your mother ever tell you that anything worth doing is worth doing right?  That’s a basic truth in cooking anything!  In this recipe, you need a couple of carrots cut into very small cubes.  So, do this like the perfectionist you are!  Peel the carrots and mince them into uniform little cubes that are not so big you wind up with carrot stew and not so small they disintegrate in the braise.  The chopped onions, celery and carrots are going to stud your gravy when the dish is done so make them beautiful.

4.Take your time.  Depending on the thickness of your veal shanks, this braise is going to take two or three hours, at least.  Think LOW AND SLOW.  Put the Dutch oven in a 325 degrees oven and then go watch the first season of Sopranos or something. And, if you’re really smart, you’ll make this dish one night, let it cool and then re-heat it gently the next night.  It will be even better, I promise.  Which makes this the perfect dinner party dish!