The Bitten Word

Crunchy French Toast with Cap'n Crunch Coating

Cook's Country (April/May 2013)

Our friends Drew and Ralph -- characters you know doubt recognize from many a dinner featured here on The Bitten Word -- have just opened a restaurant (a second restaurant, technically, that just so happens to be very favorably reviewed in today's Washington Post).

As they've been getting the new eatery up and running, they've been understandably busy, so we haven't been able to hang out as much. To make up for lost time, they invited us to come over to their house for brunch on Sunday. 

"What's for brunch?" Clay casually asked Drew a few days beforehand. 

"We saw this recipe in the latest Cook's Country that looks awes---," 

"The Really Crunchy French Toast with the Cap'n Crunch?!?!"

The answer: a resounding yes.

We'd spied this recipe when picking out April recipes. We loved the idea, but it seemed a bit of an overindulgence to just make for the two of us. 

But when friends invite you over for a French toast feast, you don't turn them down. 

 

10 Favorite Food Magazine Recipes of 2012

Plus Two Other Favorite Recipes

Happy New Year!

Before we get started looking forward, we thought we'd take a moment to look back at the past year of everything we cooked. It was a doozy of a year here at The Bitten Word and we did a lot of things that we're really proud of, from the Cupboard Cleanout to The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Challenge. And we took you along everywhere from our junk drawer to a wacky island in the Chesapeake and even all the way to China.

And in between we cooked and shared a lot of dishes that we just really loved. It was hard work narrowing it down to only 10 dishes. (If you want more, there's always the Recipe Index, which is fully updated as of today.) But narrow it down we did. Here are our 10 Favorite Food Magazine Recipes of 2012, followed by a bit about each recipe -- plus two bonus dishes, 'cause like we said, narrowing is hard..  

 

[click images to visit the original posts and get the recipes]

Black Eyed Pea Salad from Saveur -- If you didn't get your black eyed peas for good luck yesterday, atone by making this spicy fresh salad. 

Spiced Lentils and Poached Eggs from Cooking Light -- Simple, soulful and satisfying. 

Spicy Korean Grilled Pork from Food & Wine -- It's all about the sauce, which we'd slather it on just about anything. 

Quinoa Salad with Asparagus, Edamame and Radish from Fine Cooking -- This dish inspired a hundred other quinoa salads at our house this year. 

Sweet Potatoes with Bourbon and Maple from Bon Appétit -- These potatoes rocked Thanksgiving, and they've already shown up a couple other times at our house. 

Grilled Okra with Red Curry-Lime Dressing from Food & Wine -- Forget about fried okra. We're addicted to this simple grilled okra tossed with red curry. 

Moroccan Carrot Salad with Spicy Lemon Dressing from Food & Wine -- We'll never look at carrots the same way again. 

Post-Grill Marinated Grilled Skirt Steak from Cook's Country -- It's more about the technique than the dish, but we fell hard for the idea of marinating meats after they've been cooked. 

New England-Style Baked Beans from Saveur -- Sometimes a pot of beans hit the spot like nothing else. And this is a great pot of beans. 

Creamy Cauliflower Soup with Greens from Martha Stewart Living -- Want to feel virtuous? Make this soup. 

 

And here are two additional recipes that we just couldn't stand to leave off the list. 

 

Chinese Style Eggplant -- We picked up this recipe in China. The eggplant lives up to the memory every time we make it. 

Salty Caramel Ice Cream from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams -- Jeni is the queen of ice cream, and we worship at her throne. 

 

That's it -- a dozen delicious tastes from 2012. Do you have a favorite recipe of the last year that you picked up somewhere? Let us know in the comments. 

 

Other Favorite Recipes:

10 Favorite Food Magazine Recipes of 2010

11 Favorite Food Magazine Recipes of 2011

 

 

 

2012 Thanksgiving Trends: What's In and What's Out at the Thanksgiving Table This Year

 
It's 22 days till Thanksgiving. Do you know where your turkey is?

We're only half-joking. Yes, there are three weeks to Thanksgiving, with plenty of time to pull it all together. But if you're hosting a Thanksgiving meal this year, it's also time to start planning. 

We try to avoid getting caught up in food hype, but we can't help ourselves at Thanksgiving. We pore through the magazines. We try out a bunch of the dishes. We invite friends over for Fakesgiving (more on this year's event tomorrow). 

And each year, we're enamored with the Thanksgiving trends that we see across the spectrum of food magazines we receive. This year, we've closely studied 11 of those magazines, charting their Turkey Day recommendations. As we have in previous years, tomorrow we'll be publishing the 2012 Thanksgiving Index -- a round-up of all the dishes recommended this year by all 11 of those magazines.

But first, here's what we're seeing in this year's trends.

Post-Grill Marinated Grilled Skirt Steak

Cook's Country (June/July 2012)

Questioning what you're doing in the kitchen, and why you're doing it, can be a powerful thing. 

We're not talking about doubting yourself. You shouldn't. We believe in having confidence in the kitchen, and storming ahead in the face of recipe adversity -- be it overflowing pots, less-than-ideal ingredients or equipment that just won't cooperate. 

Instead of a lack of confidence, we're talking about having awareness in the kitchen: looking at what you're doing and why you're doing it, and being able to see the effect it will have on your finished dish. 

In our experience, this comes with time and practice. When we first started getting serious about cooking, we were very "safe" cooks. We almost exclusively made things that we grew up eating, or that seemed like easy meals for young twenty-somethings to make. But once we moved in together and had the space to entertain friends, we got more ambitious. The recipes got progressively more complicated, the ingredients a bit more elaborate. And then we started The Bitten Word, and things escalated from there. Suddenly we were often cooking things far outside our comfort zones, and we were delving into dishes that previously would have made us cringe. 

Looking back over the course of these last five years, we can see many changes to our cooking styles and methods, but we can also see that when we're cooking on our own -- meaning not using a recipe from a magazine or cookbook -- we're playing it less safe. We're a bit more aware of how each decision in a dish can elevate or diminish the finished product. 

But we still have a long way to go in this culinary journey. We want to be cooks who are not only aware of every move we're making in the kitchen, but who also question the methods we use, those habits we've picked up as we've learned to cook. America's Test Kitchen -- the publishers of Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country -- does this better than anyone else. The cooks there will reexamine methods that everyone takes for granted, subjecting them to testing that either reinforces or disproves those methods. Often, they end up with a recipe that's a big improvement on the traditional method.

This recipe for Marinated Grilled Skirt Steak is a perfect example. 

Fluffy Diner-Style Omelets

Cook's Country (January/February 2012)

If we serve eggs at our house, chances are they're going to be scrambled.

If we're feeling fancy, we might do over-easy, maybe served on top of a vegetable or beef hash if we're being industrious. 

Poached? Forget about it. Over-hard? Blasphemy. 

Omelets are another matter altogether. We love omelets and often order them when we go out for breakfast, but we hardly ever make them at home. Why is that? Well, in truth, we're not very good at making omelets.

We build big, beautiful omelets, cooking the eggs and then filling them with delicious vegetables and meats. And then it comes time to seal the deal (literally), and the whole thing falls apart, making for a really ugly omelet that we then hack up and serve as a scramble, as if to make ourselves feel better. 

And we're not talking about Julia Child-style omelets. (If you've never seen the Omelet Dinner Party episode of "The French Chef," you should.) We want to make omelets that are stuffed with deliciousness and then folded over, an omelet that sits tall on the plate, oozing with cheese and fillings.  

When we saw this recipe for Fluffy Diner-Style Omelets in Cook's Country, we knew the wizards at America's Test Kitchen would show us the errors of our omelet ways. 

Thanksgiving 2011: Carolina Sweet Potato Sonker

Cook's Country (November 2011)

First, we fell for "spatchcock."

Then, "sformato." 

This year, we couldn't resist "sonker."

What is it with us and the funny Thanksgiving words? 

We just had to make Carolina Sweet Potato Sonker.

Thanksgiving 2011: Make-Ahead Roast Turkey and Gravy

 

Cook's Country (October/November 2011) 

"Make-ahead turkey."

When it comes to Thanksgiving cooking, are there any three words that sound more enticing? (Or more sacrilegious? After all, what is Thanksgiving Day without slaving away in a crowded, overheated kitchen while a huge bird takes up your entire oven for three and a half hours?)

Seriously, though: "Make-ahead turkey." Think of how dry it would be! How tasteless! But think of how much easier it would make your cooking! Think of how much less stressful your Thanksgiving could be!

As Cook's Country points out, many restaurants do it for holidays, with great success, so why not try it at home? 

"Make-ahead turkey." We had to try it!

We're here to tell you, not only is this make-ahead turkey the easiest turkey recipe we've ever made, it's also the best turkey recipe we've ever made. Ever.

And p.s.? This is also the best gravy we've ever made.

Thanksgiving 2011 Recipe Index: What the Food Magazines Are Recommending

Our Fakesgiving + Our Favorite Holiday Dishes

A little more than a week ago, we had Thanksgiving.

Or really, we had Fakesgiving, our annual tradition with friends and family where we pack as many seats as possible into our apartment, make a bunch of new dishes from November food magazines, and see what everyone likes and dislikes. This year, there were 13 of us. Zach's mom and sister came and helped cook the day before (we literally could not have done it without them), and we made 17 new Thanksgiving dishes. 

(This year's Fakesgiving crowd, minus the two of us.)

Below, you'll see the initial list of recipes we started with: more than 250 Thanksgiving recipes from 10 magazines. To be included in the index, the recipes had to be part of the magazine's Thanksgiving coverage. So this is not meant to be comprehensive -- there are many more recipes in this month's magazines. If the recipe is hyperlinked, it is available online. If not, it's not there yet. 

In preparation for this year's Thanksgiving coverage, we've also created a page of Our Favorite Holiday Recipes. There, you'll find a collection of dishes from Thanksgivings, Fakesgivings and holiday dinner parties past. We'll be updating it as we introduce new content and recipes on the site.

Enjoy the index! 

Thanksgiving 2011 Trends in Food Magazines: Pies, Pecans, Ginger and Green Beans

Thanksgiving is coming! Thanksgiving is coming!

And we're ready. We've scoured the magazines, tested recipes, and we're eager talk turkey, recommend dishes, and answer any Thanksgiving-related questions you might have.

We're kicking off our Thanksgiving coverage by looking at the trends in this year's crop of magazines. As in previous years, we've indexed every single one of the November Thanksgiving recipes from the magazines in our rotation. We'll share that list with you on Monday. There are some really exciting (and bizarre) dishes among the more than 250 recipes.

But today we're going to talk about trends. 

As we pored through this year's Thanksgiving features, some clear trends emerged. To illustrate many of the trends in this year's T-Day recipes, we created word clouds, like the one above, which illustrate how frequently certain words popped up. You can click on all the word clouds to enlarge them, so you can take a closer look. 

What's the general theme for this year? Well, for a lot of our magazines, the theme seemed to be, "Thanksgiving 2011: We're Just Not That Into You." Food & Wine and Saveur seem rather light on their coverage. Even Martha Stewart Living, which we would sort of hold up as the grande dame of Thanksgiving entertaining, seemed scaled back. (We hasten to add that we're not saying that's a bad thing -- Lord knows there are plenty of great autumn recipes out there that don't involve sweet potatoes or cranberry sauce.)

But there was one magazine that blew us away this year. You guys know we tend not to single out particular magazines or issues as favorites, but this must be said: Bon Appétit BROUGHT IT this Thanksgiving. Buh-ROUGHT. IT. From its "Feast from the East" feature, which showcased marvelous ideas for an Asian-inspired Thanksgiving, to the "Down South" feature on a Louisiana Cajun Thanksgiving feast, we were enthralled. Four turkeys, a host of awesome side dishes, and drool-worthy desserts (we need that Grape-and-Apple Pie) -- the November 2011 Bon Appétit is a pleasure. Even if you're set on your Thanksgiving menu, consider picking up a copy just for fun.

Anyway, trends.

As you can see from the word cloud above, the usual suspects are, well, the usual suspects. So here's a word cloud showing all the recipe words, minus "turkey," "gravy," "cranberry," "stuffing," "potatoes," "dressing" and "roasted" (a.k.a. the saddest Thanksgiving ever):

Morning Glory Muffins

Cook's Country (May/June 2011) 

 

We've been to our fair share of coffee shops. So we were already familiar with the glories of the Morning Glory Muffin before seeing them featured in the most recent Cook's Country.

If you're not familiar with them (several friends we've discussed them with over the last week haven't been), they're those beautiful, carrot-studded concoctions of fruit and nuts, typically filled with raisins, cinnamon, walnuts and pieces of carrot. They're like the breakfast equivalent of a Compost Cookie -- a little bit of everything thrown in.  

Now, we're not usually muffin people. Breakfast around our house typically consists of protein shakes or oatmeal. On weekends we'll usually make some kind of eggs or the occasional pancake or waffle. 

But the arrival of guests is a great time to break out of your breakfast tradition. So when Zach's mom visited recently, we seized on the opportunity to make muffins.