Chef Name: Chef, Cuisine, and Menu change daily, but this particular night featured Celebrity Chef Haim Cohen, Tel Aviv, Israel

Type of Meal:
Hors d’Oeuvres and Dinner – 7pm

Kitchen Prep at the James Beard House

7 experienced servers quickly set our 10 top table filled with glasses and silverware!

Celebrity Chef Haim Cohen, Tel Aviv, Israel does a question and answer with our table! Great interaction with the Chef!

Chef Cohen was asked “How do you like the US products provided for the dinner and are they different than products you typically use at home?” ANSWER: Chef Cohen found the products to be a satisfactory substitute for the ingredients he uses as home, and he was generally impressed with the quality of the products provided. BUT, he did have to make adjustments in cooking times and such because of some textural differences in some of the products. One example was eggplant, a very common ingredient used in his cooking.

Some of What We Enjoyed (Food & Wine):

Tuna Sashimi with Lentil Salad, Fennel, Tomatoes, and Avocado paired with Yarden Viognier 2007

Puff Pastry–Wrapped Crabmeat with Poached Egg paired with Ella Valley Vineyards Chardonnay 2007

Seared Calamari with Hummus and Garbanzo Beans paired with Yarden Pinot Noir 2005

Lamb Chop with Roasted Eggplant and Focaccia paired with Ella Valley RR VC 2004

Rose Water Malabi with Pistachio Cream–Filled Kadaif paired with Yarden Heights 2006

Turkish Coffee Sundae with Shredded Halva and Rice Crispies paired with Yarden Heights 2006

Favorite Dish: As if the night wasn’t impressive enough, we were introduced to a new dessert and two new culinary terms – we love expanding our culinary encyclopedia – especially when it gives us fresh things to test in the Keeper Kitchen! The Malabi with Pistachio Cream Filled Kadaif was an intriguing dessert for us. Malabi (also called Blancmange) is a dairy based dessert similar to one of our favorite treats, panna cotta. It is made with milk, cream, sugar, gelatin, cornstarch, Irish moss, and sometimes flavored with almonds. It is traditionally set in a mold and served cold. Kadaif (also spelled Kataif) is made by layering a specific type of Kadaif pastry dough (similar to shredded phyllo), adding your choice of filling (in this case, an outstanding Pistachio Cream Filling) and baking it until golden brown.

Least Favorite Dish: The Shredded Halva Dessert was a little too sweet for us, especially for the finale dish.

Other Highlights: Being a part of a dinner at the James Beard House was a treat for sure, but to also have that dinner be the first time an Israeli Celebrity Chef is in the “JB House” made the night even more interesting. The chef and his team were very friendly and excited to be there. The four hors d’oeuvres were delightful and almost a meal alone. The best of the four was a lettuce leaf stuffed with barley that was so flavorful that we thought it must have a meat protein in the mix somewhere.  The Keeper Kitchen has recently been testing and educating ourselves on a macrobiotic diet, and this macrobiotic friendly dish only furthered our respect for that cooking style. Chef Haim Cohen is a talented and engaging chef.

Ultimate Question – Would You Go Back If You Lived in NYC? Yes, we would go back. The setting was charming. It felt good to support a good cause. The food was outside of our norm and educational to our palates, which is always a plus.

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Does this look like a kitchen tool to you?  

Here in the Keeper Kitchen we see- and taste! - a LOT of food. Did you know that we test the recipes in each cookbook before they are published? Because of this, we spend plenty of hours outside the kitchen scouring the aisles of the local grocery stores and markets for ingredients (we could probably navigate the aisles blindfolded by now).  We have just about every cooking tool imaginable to the home cook, and a ridiculously well stocked pantry of spices and staples. Needless to say, we spend even more time inside the kitchen testing, and through this process we find plenty of hits, misses, adjustments, recommendations, revelations and “mmmmmmmmmm”s along the way.  Now don’t get us wrong, we aren’t complaining because getting to cook this often ain’t a bad gig, but it does make for some interesting stories and hard work.

The taste combination we doubted but then loved the most?  

Chef Monica Pope’s Beet Brownies – The beets threw us off a bit, but we stood corrected when they turned out to be the best brownies we’ve ever tasted!  I guess that is why she gets invited to Top Chef Masters and not us!

Beet Brownies with Molasses Caramel Sauce & Meringue Pecans

The most difficult technique we’ve had to break down into steps for our subscribers?  

Typically things like homemade pastas and gnocchis.  Each chef has a slightly different method, but regardless, making these from scratch and shaping it into the different types is an involved process.  It can be difficult to put something that requires so much work of the hands into concise but descriptive enough words for someone who may be trying it for the first time.

Homemade Gnocchi

The most interesting non-cooking challenge we’ve faced while recipe testing?  

Resurrecting a chef’s defunct hard drive to retrieve some irreplaceable recipes! This was truly a test of getting the Taste from the Technology! The chef will remain unnamed, but we can promise that the cookbook is even better than before now that the rescued recipes are in it (see photo “evidence” at the begginning of this blog – can you guess which chef?).  

For continued updates on the trials and tribulations in our test kitchen, follow us on Twitter and Facebook – you just may be inspired by something new that we uncover!

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