The Bitten Word

Dark-Chocolate Cremoso with Cornflakes and Fresh Fruit

Food & Wine (May 2013)

We make mistakes in the kitchen.  

Often. 

And this post -- Dark-Chocolate Cremoso with Cornflakes and Fresh Fruit -- is a good illustration of that. 

Here's what happened.

Baby Kale and Steak Salad

Food & Wine (May 2013)
 

Do you have go-to late night food?

We live in a neighborhood with a stretch of very busy nightlife. On weekend nights, there are lines of people snaking all up and down the street.

And there's an established post-bar ritual. After the kids (yes, we're calling them kids) leave the bars, they queue up for Jumbo Slice Pizza. 

What, pray tell, is Jumbo Slice Pizza? It is, by most accounts, the biggest piece of pizza you will ever be served for five dollars. It's huge, greasy, and when you've overindulged, it is phenomenal. (Word of advice: never, ever eat the Jumbo Slice in daytime hours. It is not up to sober food standards. Believe us, we have tried.) 

Our Jumbo Slice days are behind us. Mostly.

On a much classier note, Food & Wine's May issue has a beautiful, dark spread about late-night chef food. The chef is question is Paul Qui, the nicest-seeming Top Chef winner ever. The magazine features Paul and his fiancee cooking late-night dinners after they get home from his restaurant in Austin. 

Needless to say, Paul's not returning home to fire up the oven and make a Jumbo Slice. Instead, he makes thingd like this Baby Kale and Steak Salad. 

Oil-Poached Tuna with Fennel and Orange

Food & Wine (April 2013)

We really didn't want to like this dish.

Well, wait, let's back up. Of course we originally wanted to like this dish, which is why we selected it from the most recent Food & Wine. The first time we oil-poached fish had yielded mixed results, so we wanted to try it a second time. Plus, the fennel and orange sounded like a delicious complement to the tuna.

But once we got into the prep, we quickly fell out of love.

Broccoli Rabe with Sausage

Food & Wine (April 2013)

Here are some things we like right now:

• Temperatures are up. Goodbye, winter coats! 

• Mad Men is back! Though we're sad to say that you're breaking our hearts, Don Draper....

• Our garden is starting to show signs of life. Little bits of green are peeking up through the dirt. Let's hope they're not weeds. More on that next week.

• The Cherry Blossoms hit their peak in our nation's capital this week. Yesterday, before work, we biked down to see them. We're so fortunate to live in such a beautiful city. 

Yes, spring is here, and we couldn't be happer about it. 

But here's something we don't like quite as much: We've both been incredibly busy at work as of late. And work, she takes up a lot of time. Between that and our thirst for more time outside, it means less time in the kitchen. 

We're still cooking dinner at home most nights of the week. But during the work week, we need meals that we can throw together in a short amount of time, with little thinking required. 

We need meals like this Broccoli Rabe with Sausage. 

Chinese Long Beans with Cracked Black Pepper

Food & Wine (March 2013)

When we went to China a year and a half ago, we were a little obsessed with green beans. 

We ate them as side dishes at several different meals. Sometimes, they were cooked with Sichuan peppercorns, imparting the beans with a lemony, oddly pleasant mouth-numbing effect. Other times, they were prepared more simply, with plenty of black pepper.

These Chinese Long Beans with Cracked Black Pepper from Food & Wine are the latter -- no mouth-numbing here. Just a straight-up green bean dish that, as F&W puts it, uses pantry staples to amp up a simple vegetable dish.

Fish in Crazy Water

Food & Wine (March 2013)

Sometimes, you absolutely can judge a book by its cover. Or in this case, a recipe by its name.

"Fish in Crazy Water"? How could we resist making something with such an intriguing name? And it turns out, it tastes just as awesome as its name.

This Fish in Crazy Water has actually made a couple appearances in Food & Wine now. Why? Because it's Food & Wine's birthday -- Happy birthday!

The magazine is celebrating its 35th anniversary this month by doing a bit of looking back into the archive. There's the "20 Best-Ever Recipes" and a second feature, "The Legends," that features recipes from culinary icons that were orginally featured in the magazine. 

There's Julia Child, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Jacques Pepin, Paula Wolfbert and Marcella Hazan. 

It's Marcella who contributed a recipe this Fish in Crazy Water back in 1997. 

Chocolate-Chip Cookies with Red Miso Buttercream

Food & Wine (February 2013)

We took one look at the February Food & Wine and knew that we absolutely had to make this recipe. 

First, chocolate chip cookies with icing?

You have our attention. 

Second, chocolate + miso?

Go on....

Third, the recipe is from Chef Erik Bruner-Yang, whose D.C.-based restaurant we have visited and enjoyed. 

We put on our game faces and got to baking. 

 

Bay Leaves: Worthless or Wonderful? Plus: Pressure-Cooker Chicken Stock

We have long been ambivalent about bay leaves.

When we mentioned offhand that we "sort of don't believe in" bay leaves as part of the note down within a recipe late last year, we were surprised by how many comments we received coming to the bay leaf's defense. Many of you wanted to know how the herb had done us wrong.

Here's how we fell out of love with bay leaves, and how we did a test this week to determine if we're just flat-out wrong. 

When we try out a new recipe, we are, for the most part, dutiful recipe followers. If a recipe calls for an obscure ingredient, we will hunt it down, even if that means multiple grocery store stops and lots of phone calls. And, because many recipes over the years have called for bay leaves, we've always purchased them, always fresh, never dried.

Here's how it always seems to go with bay leaves: We buy a pack and use one or two bay leaves in a recipe. We're never sure what contribution the leaf is making. We can barely smell it on its own, much less detect it in a soup, stew or broth. Nonetheless, we toss it in, per the recipe. The rest of the pack sits unused in the fridge until the leaves become brittle. We trash the old dead leaves. Next time there's a recipe that calls for bay leaves? Wash, rinse, repeat.

But the notes we got from you guys -- how you love bay leafs and consider them essential -- got us thinking. Are we wrong about bay leaves? Have we been "meh" on them for naught?

We decided to find out the best way we knew how. We made chicken stock. 

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

 

 

 

Mixed Herb Salad with Pickled Radish Vinaigrette

Food & Wine (December 2012)

There's something about a bracing winter salad that can be so satisfying for the holidays. It's like a clean knife cutting through all the heavy, rich, sweet flavors that dominate the menu this time of year.

When we had four friends -- Drew, Ralph, Ken and Jeff -- over for dinner last week, we served that wonderful Roast Lamb with Fennel and Apples, and we finished the evening with the Peppermint-Meringue Brownie Cake.

This Mixed Herb Salad was a great way to kick off that meal.