The Bitten Word

Spicy Glazed Onions

Fine Cooking (April/May 2013)

When's the last time you put down your fork and said, "Gosh, those are good onions"?

Have you ever said that?

Onions tend to get relegated to "ingredient" rather than "side dish." Nearly every recipe we make, it seems, starts with a diced onion. But we almost never see onions as a featured star.

If you're looking to change that, start with these Spicy Glazed Onions.

Honey-Roasted Radishes

Fine Cooking (April/May 2013)

We read somewhere recently that Americans waste up to 40 percent of the food we purchase -- nearly half the food in this country gets thrown in the garbage.

We like to think we're not that wasteful around the Bitten Word household (partly because we never met a leftover we didn't like, or wouldn't try to reinvent as a second dish).

Still, like everyone else, we go digging into the crisper occasionally only to find the remnants of bygone vegetables. Our Vegetable Board helps, especially in warmer months when the veggies are coming fast and furious from our CSA.  Those six months of the year are a bit of a vegetable gauntlet, as we race to use the vegetables before they spoil. (But don't worry, after too much winter, we're ready for the fresh produce onslaught. Bring. It. On.)

Radishes can seem especially challenging. We love them raw in salads, but rarely think to cook them as a side dish. Now, thanks to a feature in the April/May issue of Fine Cooking called "Radishes Can Take the Heat," we've got more than enough good ideas.

Shaved Rutabaga and Turnip Salad with Scallions

Fine Cooking (February 2013)

Forget endive.

Discard your red leaf.

And leave your radicchio in the cripser. 

It's shaved raw vegetable salads that are very "on trend" right now in food magazines. 

Over the last four months, Food & Wine (November), Bon Appétit (January), Martha Stewart Living (February) and now Fine Cooking (February) have all featured recipies for shaved salads that incorporate readily available cold weather produce -- think root vegetables, carrots, and winter squash.

The first time shaved salads really popped up on our radar was last summer, when Martha Stewart Living featured a Shaved-Squash Salad, and with it, featured a handheld Kyocera Mandoline that we couldn't resist purchasing ourselves. 

Let's talk first about owning a handheld mandoline. 

 

Thanksgiving 2012: Make-Ahead Maple-Walnut Tart

Fine Cooking (November 2012)

Let's kick off Thanksgiving with what is no doubt some Bittens' favorite course: dessert.

We're not starting out our Thanksgiving coverage with this Maple-Walnut Tart because it's delicious. (Although, don't worry, it's fantastic.)

We're starting here because this tart has a secret that can help save your Thanksgiving sanity.

That secret? It can be made up to two weeks ahead.

Thanksgiving 2012 Recipe Index: What the Food Magazines Are Recommending

Now that you're all set on the Thanksgiving trends for 2012, it's time to start planning your menu in earnest. 

As we've done for the past few years, we've gathered all the different Thanksgiving recipes from several different food magazines. This year's index features a full 239 recipes from 11 food magazines: Bon Appetit, Cook's Illustrated, Cooking Light, Everyday Food, Fine Cooking, Food & Wine, Food Network Magazine, Martha Stewart Living, Saveur, Southern Living and Whole Living. And believe us, they are absolutely packed with great ideas for Thanksgiving. 

We hosted our annual Fakesgiving this past Sunday. As you might remember, that's our yearly meal where we invite a bunch of friends to test-drive several Thanksgiving recipes. This year we had 20 friends and family to sample 19 different dishes, from a pre-dinner snack all the way through to dessert. We'll be posting about the dishes we tried over the next three weeks, in the run-up to Turkey Day.

So dig into our Thanksgiving 2012 Recipe Index! But first, we'll share a few photos from our Fakesgiving meal.

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.

Wrapping up The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Project

The inaugural Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Project is complete! 

More than 300 of you -- from all over the world! -- joined up to cook nearly every single recipe in six different October 2012 food magazines. We have absolutely loved reading about your adventures and seeing how the dishes turned out. We enjoyed hearing your stories and your thoughts on the recipes, and to see the photos of the finished products. 

Though it was a lot of work, we've had a lot of fun with this project, and we'll definitely do it again in the future, in this form or another. But for now, here are all six teams' write-ups. Explore their posts and get inspired!

(As for us, we'll be turning our attention to the Super Bowl of home-cooking -- Thanksgiving -- starting tomorrow. Don't miss it!)

Huge thanks to everyone who participated and to those who have been following along!

• Team Saveur
• Team Everyday Food
• Team Bon Appetit
• Team Food & Wine
• Team Martha Stewart Living
• Team Food Network Magazine

Enjoy!

-- Zach & Clay

Sugar Roasted Peaches

Fine Cooking (August/September 2012)

Fresh peach season is one of our absolute favorite times of year at the farmers market. But it's September now, which means fresh peaches are quickly dwindling from produce stands.

Depending on where you live, though, you might still be able to find a few stragglers from your favorite peach farmer. 

And you know what that means: Ruuuuuuuun!!! 

Grilled Salmon with Walnut-Arugula Pesto

Fine Cooking (June/July 2012)

New spins on pesto -- those that do not rely on the classic combination of basil, pine nuts, cheese and olive oil -- are a staple of food magazines. Almost every month during the spring or summer, at least one magazine is featuring a new kind of pesto that can be served with pasta, meat or chicken.

Some are all about non-pine nut pestos, one of which we've made before (an excellent pesto with walnuts). Others ditch basil for spinach, kale, parsley or other green herbs or vegetables. 

We're always smitten with the idea of these non-basil pestos, but we've rarely tried making them. The one time we have made a new take on pesto -- a brocolli pesto earlier this year-- it turned out, well, not so hot. (Our post on that includes a number of suggestions for improving it, if you want to give it a go.) 

But a recent excess of arugula had us hunting for a way to use it that didn't involve salad. After flipping through a stack of food magazines, we landed at this Grilled Salmon with Walnut-Arugula Pesto. 

Quinoa Salad with Asparagus, Edamame and Radish

adapted from Fine Cooking (June 2012)

Our friend Jim just graduated from business school, and we invited him over for a celebratory dinner. Nothing fancy -- just a few friends for backyard cocktails and some food on the grill. (We did do one little thing to make it special. We made Jim's self-proclaimed all-time favorite cake.)

The biggest rule for the dinner? No indoor cooking. It was a steamy Saturday, and we didn't want to turn our apartment into a hotbox.

So we were very pleased to come across the feature in the June Fine Cooking on grain salads. The mag proclaims them "the new summer side," and we couldn't agree more.