This Election Day/All Souls’ Day, JM is bringing the steakhouse into your house with three recipes—two which are made using a “roux” (a cooked mixture which serves as a thickening agent to a “mother” sauce like a béchamel). In these dishes, we are preparing two cheese sauces.

The first is for the “Open Book Steak,” which is an open-faced ribeye sandwich with a unique blend of onions, horseradish and cheese served over salad. It’s my take on a similar recipe in honor of a former Gallagher’s chef I once worked with. Here’s how it’s done…

Pound out a ribeye with a meat cleaver until it’s nice and flat. Season it with salt, pepper and garlic powder. Using a mandolin, slice two yellow onions. Melt ½ a stick of butter with a few glugs of olive oil in a medium sized pot and toss in onions with a little salt. After twenty minutes, add a handful of sugar. Sauté the onions on a medium flame until they become very soft, then remove from the pot and place them in a bowl. Deglaze the pot with a little white wine, and then pour the glaze on top of the onions. Set aside the bowl of onions for now.

In that same pot, prepare a roux. Start with equal parts fat (butter/lard/oil), mixed with flour, until whisked together. Slowly add in the following to create your provolone-horseradish sauce: one pint of light cream, pepper, salt, nutmeg, two tablespoons of malt vinegar, eight torn-up slices of extra sharp provolone, two tablespoons of horseradish, one tablespoon of horseradish cream (Inglehoffer brand recommended), two tablespoons of minced jarred garlic and the onions.

Next, dizzle an iron skillet with extra virgin enriched pomace olive oil and get it very hot. Place the ribeye down (you should hear it sizzle) and allow it to cook until it forms a crust on one side, then flip it so the other side cooks. In the meantime, toast up a piece of sourdough bread (or rye works great too) and butter it. Arrange a bed of Romaine down on a plate (lightly tossed in a little salt and pepper). Place the toast on top of the Romaine, then place the steak on top of the toast. Pour the sauce all over and enjoy!

One side item that goes fantastic with steak is mac & cheese. But take that blue box which directs you to cook it with a packet of yellow powder and fugheddaboutit! Here is the Johnny-fied version of “Macaroni in EXTRA Creamy Cheese Sauce” which also happens to have another major meat participant—bacon—and why not?

Fry ½ pound of bacon in a pan with a little olive oil. Once crisp, remove all the strips and drain on a plate for later. Carefully pour all the pan drippings into a sauce pot (you are going to use these drippings to start this roux.) Now, to make cheese sauce, slowly add in the following: one pint of light cream, pepper, salt, nutmeg, two tablespoons of sour cream, one cup grated Pecorino-Romano, a six oz. package (which is eight wedges) of Laughing Cow Swiss cheese, an eight oz. container of WisPride Port Wine cheese spread, one cup of shredded mozzarella, one cup of shredded provolone and one cup of shredded cheddar (extra sharp). Keep sauce on stovetop for a minimum of 45 minutes, occasionally stirring, until all cheeses are melted.

In the meantime, you want to par-boil about a pound and a half of macaroni (I’d go with rotini) until just pre-aldente, and then transfer to a buttered casserole dish. Cover pasta with the cheese sauce and top with a layer of the bacon (crumbled up) and another sprinkling of shredded cheddar. When covering the macaroni with the cheese sauce, you can add a little of the pasta water if you find the sauce is a bit thick to retain a more liquidy consistency and prevent clustering of the noodles. Bake in the oven for about fifteen to twenty minutes at 300 degrees. Garnish with a bit of chopped parsley and fresh cracked pepper.

Finally, what happens when you soak an onion ring in a liquid bath of cream or buttermilk (or my choice—beer), and then combine the flour and breadcrumb together with spices to create a dry mix for one simple dredging? This may seem strange, but if you ever wondered how some of these steakhouses obtain such a crisp texture to those rings, that is how it’s done. Don’t confuse this with “beer-battered,” which is pouring the beer along with the spices and the flour all together to create a wet batter to dip into before frying. These are “beer bathed” and THEN dipped into the dry coating, which I have found enables the onion ring to become seasoned to perfection and get super crisp.

See if the onion is only dipped in a beer/flour mixed batter, a lot of the time what happens is a “shell” forms around the onion which generally falls off—especially if the oil it was fried in wasn’t hot enough. (You also will tend to find the onion being literally pulled out of the outer coating if you don’t bite into it good enough.) My trick adheres the spices to the onion and enables them to stay intact and extra crunchy in this recipe, which I call “Beer-Soaked Deep-Fried Onion Rings.”

First, bring a large, deep pot which has been filled ¾ of the way to the top with pomace oil to approximately 370 degrees. You can also use an Italian “blended” oil which is generally a 10% olive oil to corn/peanut oil mix. I highly recommend these oils for deep-frying as opposed to plain old Crisco or any vegetable/frying oils on the market. Slice three large onions into rings. Soak them in a large bowl of beer (go with P.B.R.) mixed with a few splashes of club soda for about a half hour.

In another large bowl, combine the following ingredients: two cups of all purpose flour, one cup of panko breadcrumbs, ½ cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, two tablespoons of garlic powder, two tablespoons of granulated onion powder, one tablespoon of cayenne pepper, one tablespoon of paprika.

Carefully dredge onion rings, then drop about four-five at a time into the oil and close the lid. After about four minutes you will see them rise to the top and crisp up. Remove them, strain, and immediately season with salt and pepper while they are still warm and have a little of the oil still on them. Finish the rest of the onion rings in the same manner and serve with your favorite sauce. I like a full buffet of dips including malt vinegar, Ranch dressing and Heinz 57.

So when you want to save yourself $200 at some fancy chophouse, convert your kitchen. Cigars and snifters are optional for dessert.