The Chronicles of Worth Kitchen: The Cheese, The Fig, and The Balsamic Vinegar

I must confess, keeping up with my "real" job and this blog in the past couple of weeks has become more difficult than originally planned. I do apologize for the tardiness in this post, but I will use this weekend to get up-to-date. For anyone working in advertising, I am currently in what is known as "production hell." So I have been hard at work and somewhat ignoring my blogging duties (definitely not ignoring my chef duties, I actually believe that in the past 3 dinners I have significantly stepped up my cooking, more on that in the posts to follow). And this works as a great transition to the pictures and recipes of our 14th dinner, where I ignored to place the chicken in the oven (I am sure you read about this in Tamy's post last week).

Dinner #14 was by far a fantastic success. Our guests brought something incredible to the Worth Kitchen table and the conversations lasted until the far reaching hours of the night. And even though I did neglect to put the chicken in the oven in a timely manner, the food came out excellent. It was a triple theme night as far as the kitchen is concerned, in every plate we used figs, balsamic vinegar and cheese (pasteurized cheese of course due to the fact that one of our guests was pregnant).

Our appetizer was a goat cheese stuffed fig wrapped in prosciutto sitting on a bed of arugula

This version of the salad without the prosciutto was made for Mireia our pregnant guest, but truthfully makes for a much better presentation. Once the figs are stuffed with the cheese, they are broiled for about 5 minutes with honey on top.

The famous chicken I forgot to place in the oven in time and delayed the meal by 30 minutes. It was was stuffed and rolled with mushrooms, rosemary, shallots, figs and mozzarella. The rosemary twig was used to "sew" the chicken together while in the oven.

The sauce that accompanied the chicken was a fig and balsamic reduction. The pasta was a cilantro based pasta that was definitely the most popular recipe of the night. Adam and Eric definitely requested the recipe so I have added the full recipe below. This plate is very unique and I am very proud to say that is come from Colombian origins. Very easy to make, yet the taste is something totally unexpected.

Cilantro Pasta

2 cups of chopped cilantro
1 cup of olive oil
2 tablespoons of mustard
2 egg yolks
Linguini/Spaghetti

Place chopped cilantro, mustard, egg yolks, portion of olive oil, salt & pepper into a food processor/blender. Begin to process at slow and slowly pour in the olive oil (should be a hair thin pour) sauce begins to take form and gets thick.
Cook pasta & drain. Replace hot pasta into pot and mix in cilantro sauce (pasta needs to still be hot). Sauce will cook onto the pasta.

The dessert was a frozen mascarpone and fig mixture stuffed inside a frozen (hollow) fig served with a small scoop of vanilla ice cream and balsamic reduction sauce. The result was fantastic. A definite repeat.

I want to thank all of our guests for making dinner 14 such a fantastic and memorable night.

A very special thanks to Erik for the fantastic Thank You note you wrote us.

Hope to see you all soon at another Thursday.

Even if you try, you will never be TOO ready...

...was the big learning coming out of Thursdays at Worth Street, dinner #14. After the experience of dinner #13. where I will say we "lacked organization" to keep this as free spirited as possible (it really was a bit chaotic), we decided to get a head start and do the grocery shopping as well as the dessert, one night before the dinner. This was MONUMENTAL, we were surprised at how ahead of the game we were, we felt we had it all figured out, we were ready to go, our upcoming Thursday dinner would turn out to be impeccable! It had to! We were inviting editor and creator of Tribeca Citizen, who wanted to write about us and had even asked if he could take notes and pictures. The pressure was on, and this time, I wasn’t about to use wine as a resource again (another learning from the last dinner). We also had invited Lee, the director of strategy at 360i, who I had only met once, and his wife, an art historian and now interior designer, who I was going to meet for the first time. The other two guests were good friends of ours, there to ease some of the tension and bring with them a familiar element. So there we were, Felipe and I, 7:30 PM on Thursday, already prepping for the food with dessert done and an appetizer that was almost ready to go. We couldn’t believe how little we had to do and how small the chances were that things could go wrong with the plates. To be completely honest, we had also played it a bit safe with the food, making figs and balsamic vinegar two of the overarching ingredients (how can one go wrong with figs!).

The night started out beautifully. Since we had done much of the prepping, we were able to take the time to enjoy the guests, ease drop on the conversations, contribute on the topics of discussion, and sip on the beautiful bottle of Champagne Lee had brought over. We sat down for dinner at a very reasonable hour for us (9:30!) and opened up the dinner with an appetizer that was small and perfect to open the appetite. Things were going so smoothly, I began feeling we were really starting to get a hang of this, we were discovering the right combination, the right process to go about these dinners, the perfect formula! After making some time between plates, I got up and began picking up the plates so that we could start serving the second course. And as I was almost on the last plate, I turned around to see Felipe wave to me, asking me to come closer. He had a small, mischievous smile on his face so I figured he was just as relaxed as I was, and was just enjoying the night. As I got closer to him, he asked me to get closer, close enough to whisper in my ear. As I leaned over, I heard the words which I was not expecting at all: "Honey, I forgot to put the chicken in the oven". I pulled back, we looked at each other and all of a sudden, we were both caught in an uncontrollably, non stop laugh attack. It was a nervous type of laugh, it was also a laugh of disbelief, how can that have happened! There was so little we had to do, putting the chicken in the oven was if not one of the only cooking activity, the main one for sure. After we were done laughing, I asked Felipe exactly how much more time he needed and he replied 13 minutes, which I calculated would really be about 15 to 20. So after trying to figure out what to do, we decided to just be open and honest about it. We held hands as we walked to the table, where all our guests were wondering what in the world was going on with us. Felipe sat down to deliver the confession and began with - “we got something to tell you”, which scared everyone for a moment and also made everything that came afterwards so not a big deal (good strategy Felipe!). People cheered and were happy to keep drinking and talking.

The chicken turned out tasting delicious and the night ended up being a remarkable one filled with great company, great wine and food, and great stories. We left to go to Mexico early the following morning, and the chicken became the topic of conversation. What turned out to be an ordinary stuffed chicken made it into conversations overseas, lucky chicken and lucky us!