The Bitten Word

Cupboard Cleanout: Day 1 -- Whole Wheat Pasta with Short Rib Ragu

Our grand experiment has begun: One week of eating only the food we already have in our freezer, fridge and pantry.

We started off by making a full inventory of our larder -- all the forgotten pastas, misbegotten pre-made sauces, and truly random ingredients lurking in our cupboard. You can read the whole list after the jump.

For our inaugural cleanout meal Sunday night, we eased ourselves in with a pretty tame dinner. We defrosted some braised short ribs and pearl onions, left over from when we made those Short Rib Pot Pies back in October. We added a little tomato paste, some red wine and some Salsa Lizano to make it a little more saucy, and we threw in some frozen peas to liven it up. We served it over some whole wheat spaghetti noodles.

Day 1 Dinner: Whole Wheat Pasta with Short Rib Ragu
Cupboard Items Used: Frozen leftover short rib filling, frozen peas, spaghetti
Degree of Difficulty: 2 out of 10
Verdict: Delicious! Rich and savory and meaty, this was an excellent way to kick off our Cupboard Cleanout.

Read the full list of all the random stuff we'll be trying to figure out how to use this week, after the jump!

January and February Covers Gallery + Win a Cookbook in Our Latest Giveaway

Here are two things that stuck out to us about the most recent food magazine covers. 

In January, the month of "light" this and "new you" that, Food & Wine placed a nacho burger on its cover. Forget you, diet! 

And in February, none of the 10 magazines we track put chocolate on the cover. Somewhere, St. Valentine is weeping. (As if to make up for it, the March Food Network Magazine just arrived in our mailbox and it's "The Chocolate Issue.") 

There are several covers that we truly loved over the past two months, and you can see them in the gallery below. And we want to know what you think. 

Since we loved the Soba Noodles with Eggplant and Mango from Plenty so much, we decided to give it away here on the blog. It's a beautiful book. Believe us, you need this book. 

Here's how you can win it.  

Soba Noodles with Eggplant and Mango

From Plenty: Vibrant Vegetables from London's Ottolenghi by Yotam Ottolenghi

At the end of last year, Plenty -- a new cookbook from London Chef Yotam Ottolenghi -- was turning up all over the place. It was mentioned in just about every magazine we receive, and we saw it on dozens of best-cookbooks-of-2011 lists. 

A few weeks ago we reserved it from the library to see what all the fuss is about. 

And let us tell you: It was love at first sight. 

This book grabbed us at the introduction. Although Ottolenghi is not a vegetarian, he has written a column called "The New Vegetarian" for a British newspaper. This book is essentially a collection of recipes from that column, so it's all vegetables from the point of view of a meat eater. Often, recipes will include suggestions of what meat to serve along with the dish. Most of the recipes, though, look substantial enough to serve as the main dish of any meal. 

As you know, we usually find ourselves at the carnivore end of the scale. But we've wanted to cut back the amount of meat in our diet. If you're looking to do the same, Plenty may be all the inspiration you need. 

The book is categorized by vegetables ("Funny Onions," "Roots," "Leaves," etc.) and there are at least a dozen dishes we're eager to make. A Caramelized Garlic Tart. Chard and Saffron Omelettes. Sweet Corn Polenta. We're dreaming of spring and summer already. 

But one dish lept out to us from the page: these Soba Noodles with Eggplant and Mango. 

Clean-Out-the-Cupboard Week Starts Sunday. Play Along at Home?

After we made the New Year's resolution to get organized in the kitchen, a reader named Susan left an excellent suggestion for how we could pare down our overflowing food cupboards:

Can I make a suggestion? I try to do this with my family every so often... Can you take a period of time (say a week), where you spend absolutely zero $$$ on food? I find that between my freezer and my pantry, there is enough food to feed us for up to probably a month!

If you did that, you would certainly be able to justify purchasing that crown roast! And you would probably have some fun adventures meanwhile, trying to make decent meals out of the excess in your cupboards!

We loved Susan's idea -- so that's just what we're going to do! And we want you to play along at home.

Here's what we'll do.

You Shared the Shame: Readers' Junk Drawers!

When we told you about our secret kitchen shame -- an overflowing junk drawer -- we invited readers to share images of their own kitchen clutter. And share you did! Dozens of your wrote in to empathize or to out certain family members as kitchen hoarders.

And plenty of you actually shared your junk drawer pics with us! 

So let's take a journey inside the junk drawers of some very brave Bitten Word souls.

 

From Kathleen: "At least you've cleaned yours out!"

Orange-Scented Olive-Oil Cake with Orange Compote and Ganache

Martha Stewart Living (February 2012)

Here's something we probably don't need to tell you: Martha Stewart Living has nice photography. Great photography, in fact. 

But there's a feature in the current February issue that has such stunning, jaw-droppingly gorgeous photos, we wanted to cook something from it just so we could talk about the pictures.

Could this Orange-Scented Olive-Oil Cake with Orange Compote and Ganache possibly live up to its photo?

Embarking on Year 5. Introduce Yourself!

Today marks the beginning of year five of The Bitten Word. Yes, friends, it's our blogiversary!

Four years ago today, we started writing this blog to help us stick to a new year's resolution to start cooking from our food magazine subscriptions. Today, more than 600 posts later, we're still at it. 

We've changed a bit over the course of the last four years. We're far more knowledgeable in the kitchen. Cooking with frequency and from a variety of sources has given us an education of sorts that we didn't expect when we started blogging. 

So why do we continue to write this blog?

Well, it's actually a lot of fun to do this together. We each have our own careers, and this has been a nice place to play and learn together, spending time in the kitchen, laughing and sharing food with friends. 

We continue to learn. There are still plenty of techniques we're eager to try and dishes we want to master. We love this aspect of cooking -- there's always a new recipe for roast chicken that we want to try. We love learning more about photography, and love seeing how much our photos have improved over the last four years. (Seriously, take a gander at the photos from our first month. WOOF.) 

And we still love food magazines. Each month we read at least 10 food magazines, and we still get excited when they show up in our mailbox. Even when we're critical of a recipe, we're still on the side of the magazines. And we want you to subscribe to food magazines. We're not writing this blog so that you will cancel your subscriptions. Rather, we're writing this blog as a fun companion to the magazines, and hopefully even expose you to some magazines you haven't sampled on your own. If you don't have one, get yourself a subscription. But take it from us, it's probably not a good idea to get 10 subscriptions. 

What we want out of Year 5 of The Bitten Word.

We're going to continue to try new dishes. Most of them will continue to be from food magazines. We'll also share a fare smattering of our own creations this year. At the same time, we're going to tell you about other food we're eating, books we're reading, share more videos and introduce you to people we love. 

What we want from you. 

Almost every time we've ever been interviewed about the blog, we've been asked some version of, "What's your favorite thing about writing The Bitten Word?"

We should probably give a better interview and mix up our answer from time to time, but we always say the same thing: hearing from our readers. It's true.

Your comments and emails, tweets and posts have been the absolute highlight of our experience as bloggers. You've shared your own hilarious stories, favorite recipes, heartbreaking news, restaurant tips, kitchen rants and from the looks of the comments, a lot of you are selling prescription medications at rock-bottom prices. (Just kidding -- we delete the spam comments.)

So if you have a moment, give us a blogiversary gift and introduce yourself. For those of you reading from feeds, you can do it here. It doesn't matter what you say. Tell us about where you live, or what you like to cook, or something you're hoping to learn this year. Tell us what you want to hear about from us this year, recommend a book, or share the best thing you ever eaten. Just introduce yourself. We can't wait to hear from you! 

Here's to an amazing fifth year. Let's do this thing.  

-- Clay & Zach

Poached Scrambled Eggs with Goat Cheese Sauce

Food & Wine (January 2012)

We like to think we're pretty good at scrambled eggs. We have a particular way of doing it that makes eggs just the way we like 'em: creamy and soft and delicious. Essentially, it involves cooking them over very low heat and stirring almost constantly. (Also, we picked up a tip a very long time ago from an otherwise ridiculously over-the-top omelet recipe: Stirring eggs with a chopstick or the thin end of a wooden spoon yields perfect fluffy eggs every time.)

We love the way we make scrambled eggs. The only problem is that it can take 15 or 20 minutes of near-constant stirring.

So we were more than a little intrigued by this recipe, which promises perfectly scrambled eggs in only 40 seconds. FORTY. SECONDS.

Quick New England Fish Chowder

Cook's Illustrated (January/February 2012)

New England fish chowder. Just the mention of it evokes blustery winter evenings, salty sea air, crackling fireplaces and nubby wool sweaters.

And while it's barely dipped below 45 degrees here all winter, we thought the idea of a big steaming bowl of fish chowder sounded extremely comforting and tasty for the beginning of February.

Cleaning Out Our Junk Drawer

 

One of our Culinary Resolutions for 2012 was to get organized in the kitchen. It's the one resolution we've tackled head-on over the last month, and we've already made some decent strides toward our goal.

We did a major streamlining of our pots and pans, paring down to the essentials we really use and donating the rest. (Goodbye, first set of Target cookware! We applaud your decade of service!) 

We took what was left and organized it in a way that makes sense. It's amazing how easily we're able to find things now, and how much less painful it is to go hunting for a lid in the depths of our cabinets. It makes us wonder why we hadn't gotten serious about getting organized before now. Lesson learned. For now. 

And while our food cupboards are still pretty full (look for us on an upcoming season of Hoarders: Someone Please Eat This!), we've been making a concerted effort to eat down what's been piling up in there. (Spoiler alert: We've been eating a lot of lentils. And you'll likely be hearing about it very soon.)

But our junk drawer remained a stubborn spot of chaos. Crammed with everything you can imagine (and some things you couldn't imagine), it was a disorganized, useless mess. We have literally spent hours of our lives searching for things in this jumble of kitchen gear and random items that don't belong elsewhere. 

This weekend, we called time on the junk drawer and decided to do something about it. In fact, we made a little video about it.