Dinner #32 - Cold Winter Night with Some Comfort Food

For this dinner we were able to bring some very close friends as well as some strangers. The night was full of a very fun conversation and incredible comfort food.

The now famous croquetas with wild boar and fontina cheese. This was our second run with the croquetas and mastered the recipe. Later we replaced the wild boar with panceta, so good.

To add to the comfort food, I was able to create a personal favorite,  pasta ai frutti di mare. With a little added arrabbiata spice, just to heat up the night.

Another favorite, pumpkin creme brulee.

A lot of smiles, always the best sign for an amazing night! Oh and congratulations to Alonso and Alex on their recent engagement! 

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.

The Healthier Side of Life

What an awesome time. Sometimes it is really fun to write in retrospect, why? Well because before every dinner I am always running. Always with the adrenaline levels high, yet the stress levels are low. The adventure begins the moment I step out of work. The dash to the market (usually Whole Foods, but after today I think Chelsea Market is by far the best place to go in New York City for crazy ingredients), running through the aisles to grab all the ingredients as quickly as I can. I always have a list written, ALWAYS, if not I will get distracted in the amazing truffle oil or the fresh sea bass or what not. I need to focus, this place is the closest thing to a playground that I have had since I was 6 years old. Veggies, check, fruit, check, meats or seafood check. Do I need some saffron butter? No, but at that gives me some amazing ideas for the future! Regardless, the point is I never have enough time to write in real time before the dinner. The moment we close the door after our last guest has left there is an immediate rush of "Wow, what a fantastic success!" And that is the energy we use to communicate with. So again... What an awesome night.

Challenges are always fun. And every week we receive people with different dietary needs or restrictions. Its part of our plan to adapt to others instead of other adapting to our food. At the end of the day I prefer for everyone to enjoy their dinners rather than leave a plate half full of food. So this time around, when I heard we had a vegetarian coming, I decided to have the appetizer dedicated to her needs, and it wasn't a salad. That morning while running, I had a crazy inspiration to make a ceviche, but instead of your regular ceviche I would make a veggie ceviche. In my head it made sense, now it just needed to execute it well.

As for the main dish, I wasn't going to sacrifice the protein for everyone, but I wasn't going to let our vegetarian suffer either. So I made a delicious zucchini pasta (imagine the zucchini cut jullien style, mimicking a linguini) as a side (main dish for our vegetarian) with turkey-bacon wrapped scallops. Imagine this combined with some amazing champagne, malbec and great friends, the perfect combination for a great night.

Now for all of you reading this, and I really hope there are a lot of you reading this. Please let me know what you think about the recipes. If you try them out, let me know how they went. I would love your feedback. We finally fixed the feedback options below, so you can leave it as anonymous if you would like. Oh, and by the way, thanks for reading!

Here are the recipes:

Veggie Ceviche

2 green tomatos

10 baby corns

1 red onion

1 white pear

1 cup of edamame beans

6 limes squeezed

1/2 cup of fresh orange juice.

3 tb spoons of fresh cut cilantro

3 tb spoons of fresh thyme

3 tb spoons of fresh rosemary

The preparation of this is quite simple, the only real trick is in you mastery with the knife. All ingredients must be sliced very very thin, to the degree in which its almost transparent. Nothing is cooked, steamed, or baked, thats what the citric acids of the lime and orange are for. Begin by placing the lime juice and the orange juice in a mixing bowl. Then cut the red onion as thins as you can place it into the juice mix. After that, cut and mix the rest of the veggies as thin as you can and mix it with the onions. The baby carrots might be more difficult to slice, so try to at least cut in half. The edamame beans is the only veggie that you have to steam, but after steaming cool quickly by rinsing through ice cold water. Split the edamame in half (can be done easily by hand). Once all veggies are mixed in, add the chopped cilantro, thyme and rosemary. Let the mix sit in a fridge for about an hour, this will allow the lime juice and orange juice to seep into the veggies.

Zucchini Pasta

1 green zucchini

1 yellow zucchini

1 lemongrass

3 servings of spaghetti (about half of a box)

Salt

water

Another very simple dish to prepare where the most important part of the preparation is the actual cutting of the veggie. Cut the zucchinis jullien style (into long thin straw like pieces) and steam for about 4 minutes in salted water with the lemongrass (cut in half longwise).

Cook the past in boiling water with salt (do not worry about adding a lot of salt, this will flavor the pasta) to al dente.

Mix the zucchinis and the pasta together. To serve, twist the pasta with a large serving fork onto the plate and make sure the zucchini (which will be soft and flexible) is wrapped around to give it the feeling of additional pasta.

You may see this plate, a pasta with no additional sauce as bland, but the taste all lies in the preparation of each ingredient. You will end up with a very flavorful combination.

Turkey bacon wrapped Scallops

18 Scallops

9 pieces of turkey bacon

3 tb spoons of fresh thyme

3 tb spoons of fresh rosemary

1 cup of orange juice

4 tb spoons of butter

4 tb spoons of olive oil

1 shallot

3 tb spoons of aged balsamic (about 12 to 15 years)

For the sauce, chop the shallot up and place it into a sauce pan with half of the butter melted. Add a pinch of salt then the orange juice with the olive oil. Let the mix reduce a bit. Very simple, but the olive oil and the oranje juice should create a great flavorful mix.

For the scallops, cut the bacon in half lengthwise (most turkey bacon is very wide) and wrap each scallop with the raw bacon. Put a toothpick through the bacon and the scallop. Heat up the skillet and place the butter to melt. Salt each scallop with a small pinch of sea salt and a mix of rosemary and thyme. Place the scallops in the hot skillet salted face down and repeat mixture on the other side. Cook each side for about 5 minutes (bacon will cook through, do not worry).

When serving the scallops, be sure to remove the toothpicks (thats what I am actually doing in the picture above). Sprinkle the orange sauce on each scallop and the aged balsamic after that. Sprinkle some on the empty plate for decoration purpose.

And so it begins...

It’s absolutely fascinating to see how the creative mind works. I experience it daily at my day job. You see I work at a very large ad agency, and creative ideas are our daily bread. I have the pleasure of working with some amazing creative talent and see how they develop their ideas to execution. My job role does not have any part in the creation process, I work more on the strategic process of defining who we are talking to and making sure that the execution is in line with what the client’s needs are. At the end of the day, it’s very executional and not very creative. However, this all changes when I begin to plan a dinner and the creative process that follows is how my creative mind works.

When we embarked on executing this idea of special dinners every Thursday, I made it a clear challenge to myself that I would not be creating dishes that I was very familiar with, but instead taking myself out of my comfort zone and working on anything and everything I could. Which lead to the inspiration for this week.

Our original invitees for the week were two women, one pregnant and with a tight diet and the other a health nut with a vegan heart (but not vegan at all). I decided to create something based on the audience and their dietary needs. So I began with the easiest part, the main plate.

[ENTER STATE OF MIND]
A fish, what fish? But wait Tamy (my wife) hates fish. But she liked the fish we had at our wedding. Sea Bass. Can’t go wrong with a sea bass, but what do with it? Sauce? Garnishes? Yes, Cilantro pasta! Sauce? Hhhmmm (we’re eating Peruvian later tonight so my mind goes directly there) Aji Amarillo. YES an Aji Amarillo sauce with a goat cheese base. Do we need a veggie? How about broccolini with mushrooms? No that’s two greens and a yellow, the color scheme would be totally off and look bad. Do we need a third? No forget it. We have our main dish.

Now for an appetizer…
We started considering something with mushrooms, Tamy suggested stuffed mushrooms, hhmmm doesn’t quite fit with the main dish. There needs to be some connection between one dish and the other. We go through the entire process of creating a dish (which we might use later) of stuffed mushrooms with bacon bits, brie cheese. Sounds delicious but not for this dinner.

Finally I decide to go with a salad, a refreshing salad, yet still one that is unusual. Arugula, mango, papaya, Tamy suggests cucumber (delicious) and an orange/lime ginger dressing. Perfect!

[EXIT STATE OF MIND]

“What about dessert?” she asks. Well, I am nor really the dessert guy. Why? Well because dessert is much more of a science, too much or too little of any ingredient and your soufflé doesn’t rise, your mousse stays liquid, or your tart tastes flat. You see, I am much more the style of cook that puts in what ‘feels’ right, not an exact recipe to the teaspoon (so please follow my recipes as that, they are not exact!). To that note, I would wait until the last minute to see what I was going to do with dessert, but I promise, no cop out by buying ice cream or anything else like that.

So the day arrives and I have added one additional friend to the list of invitees, a former co-worker that just moved into the city, he would make a great addition to the group. What seemed to be a short day at work ended up being a lengthy one followed by a running trip through Whole Foods buying all the ingredients. Long story short, I arrive home at 7:45 guest are arriving at 8 and I have not even begun unpacking the ingredients. Prioritization is of essence, but I work very well under pressure and especially in the kitchen (mind you that the mess I leave behind after cooking, under these circumstances, is huge). So I begin with dessert first as this takes the longest cooking time in the fridge. This is what I prepared:

Coconut/Mango Mousse
1 Mango
1 can of Coconut Milk
2 Egg whites
1/3 cup of heavy whipping cream
1 envelope of gelatin
½ cup of sugar (cane sugar)
Grated ginger (fresh)
Grated lime peel

Combine the coconut milk, the egg whites, whipping cream, ginger and sugar in a bowl and beat well with a hand mix until the mix will begins to foam up. Transfer to a double boiler until it simmers then mix in the gelatin, stir. Pour mix into 6 separate bowls.
Dice mango into small cubes and place in each bowl.
Place bowls in the fridge for approximately 3 hours.
When removing from fridge before serving, grind a little lime peel for color and flavor.

Next up, I took time to begin what I should have done from the beginning, but with the longest plate out of the way, I prepped the main plate and appetizer. Had everything cut up and ready to go so it would be a much easier process on preparing the dishes. I prepared all dishes more or less at the same time, however I held off on cooking the fish until the appetizer was almost finished. So here are the remaining 3 dishes starting with the appetizer:

Arugula Papaya/Cucumber Salad
1 bag of Arugula
2 cups of diced papaya
1 cup of thinly sliced cucumber

Dressing:
1 lemon
½ cup of orange juice
¼ of a cup of olive oil
Honey (to taste)
Grated ginger (fresh)

For the dressing, squeeze the juice out of the lemon and mix all the ingredients together. Please note that the honey is for additional sweetness, I prefer to add approximately two spoonfuls, but this is to taste.
Mix the dressing in with the arugula just before serving. Serve arugula first then add the papaya and cucumber on top.

Now for the main dishes:

Chilean Sea Bass with Aji Amarillo/Goat Cheese sauce
1 Aji Amarillo chile
1 yellow onion
2 cups of dry white wine
3 tablespoons of butter
1/2 cup of heavy whipping cream
1 roll of goat cheese
4 pieces of Chilean sea bass

Sauce:
Place 2 tbs of butter into a small sauce pan, melt then place chopped onions until soft. Add wine and aji and let it reduce for 10 minutes. Add whipping cream and salt and pepper to flavor. Pass mix through food processor or blender, then strain into sauce pan. Melt the goat cheese into the mix. Sauce should look thick.

Fish:
Cook fish on a skillet just before serving. Total cooking time is about 8 to 10 minutes. Melt butter in skillet and place previously salt & peppered fish steak into skillet. Let it cook for 4 minutes then turn. Serve on dish then use sauce as a garnish on top of filet.

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.

As for serving, my personal choice was to serve the fish with a spoonful of sauce on top as well as a spoonful garnish on the side. The pasta was rolled and served on the other side of the fish.