The Bitten Word

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

Martha Stewart Living Cover-to-Cover: All the Recipes in the October 2012 Issue

Part 1 of The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Project

Cover-to-Cover, here we go!

Earlier this month we challenged our readers to make every dish in the October issues of six food magazines. You guys more than rose to the challenge. We were blown away by the responses we got, and by all your fun stories of cooking dishes from the mags.

In all, more than 500 people signed up to participate! Amazing! We wish we could have included everyone, but we just had to cap the number, mostly for our own sanity. In the end, we wound up with more than 350 participants, from Bali, Brazil, London, Paris, Hungary, and all over the U.S. and Canada. How cool is that?!

For Part 1, we're starting off easy, with Martha Stewart Living. Well, not easy on those who participated in the project -- the recipes are nothing to sniff at. We're starting here because it's easy on us -- there are only 25 dishes. 

Team Martha faced some interesting dishes (lots of Halloween party food), some classics (fried chicken, handmade pasta) and some things that we're just dying to eat (the desserts here all sound amazing). 

With that, let's see what Team Martha cooked up over the last few weeks! Here are the dishes, in our readers' own words and photography. 

Skillet Corn, Edamame, and Tomatoes with Basil Oil

Martha Stewart Living (August 2012)

Martha had us at basil oil.

We're honestly not sure we would have made this if it had been called "Skillet Corn, Edamame, and Tomatoes with Basil," just because it sounds like a dish we've already made a hundred times. But add "basil oil" to the title, and we were totally on board. 

Essentially, this is a succotash, even though it's not called that. And Lord knows we love a succotash. (Would a succotash by any other name still taste as amazing? YES.)

But the basil oil intrigued us. We almost always throw a handful of chopped basil into a corn succotash -- the flavors are perfect together. But the idea of infusing oil with basil, and then using that as a dressing, made us really eager to try this dish.

Well, we did have one big takeaway from this recipe. But it wasn't the basil oil.

Grilled-Peach Old-Fashioned

Martha Stewart Living (July 2012)

Look, we hate to complain about taking a vacation, but here goes anyway:

Isn't the week back at work after a vacation the worst? You're digging out of hundreds of emails, scrambling to get caught up at work and all the while thinking about how this time last week you were sitting on a beach. Doesn't it just make you...want a cocktail?

Well, we certainly do. And we're looking forward to capping off this week with a nice, cool sipper. Perhaps we'll make a couple of these Grilled Peach Old-Fashioneds.

Chili-and-Cucumber Margarita

Martha Stewart Living (July 2012)

There's a Mexican place around the corner from our apartment. It actually serves authentic Oaxacan food -- think organic duck in a mole sauce or Oaxacan queso topped with fried grasshoppers.

And there's something about the place that is oh so tempting every single time we walk by. (No, it's not the grasshoppers.) It's their margarita menu. Every day the place features a different flavored margarita, temptingly described on a chalk sign out front.

Blackberry margaritas. Blood orange margaritas. Prickly pear margaritas....  Have we mentioned that we have to walk past this place every day on the way home from work? Somebody should give us a medal for not dropping in every single night.

Bad news, though: The margarita temptation has now followed us home.

Our Test Kitchen Tour

As you might remember, visiting a food magazine test kitchen is something that's been on our list of Culinary Resolutions for two years now. 

Last Friday, we finally had the opportunity to make that resolution a reality. Where'd we go? We'll let this photo do to talking:

Yep! We were fortunate enough to be given a tour of the offices of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, in New York. We had the best time!  And of course we wanted to share our photos with you.

So come along!

Escarole, Kale, White Bean and Tomato Lasagna

Martha Stewart Living (April 2012)

If you're a big fan of traditional lasagna, there's a recipe in this month's Martha Stewart Living that may seem like sacrilege. 

As part of a feature on how to incorporate more kale and other greens into your diet, this Escarole, Kale, White Bean and Tomato Lasagna is billed a healthy take on the Italian classic. 

We had to know: Can a lasagna that uses no noodles, no meat, no bechamel and no ricotta be a good stand-in for traditional lasagna?

Curried Red-Lentil Soup with Dried Cherries and Cilantro

Martha Stewart Living (March 2012)

We've had a crush on red lentils for a few months.

It all started innocently enough. On kind of whim, we bought a variety of lentils from the bulk section of the organic market up the street from our house. (Yes, purchasing bulk lentils at an organic market qualifies as a "whim" Chez Bitten.)

While we enjoyed all the lentil we sampled, it was the red lentils that had us hooked. We can't tell you how many times this winter we ate cooked red lentils with some fresh basil (well, fresh-frozen basil) stirred in. It's a plain but very satisfying lunch -- and a very healthy one. 

But that's where our lentil project plateaued. We had grand plans to make other lentil dishes, but we got stuck in Red-Lentils-with-Basil Land, and we never left. 

So we were very happy to see this Curried Red-Lentil Soup with Dried Cherries and Cilantro from Martha Stewart Living.

Spicy Tofu with Beef and Szechuan Peppercorns

Martha Stewart Living (February 2012)

Ever since we first ate Sichuan peppercorns in China last fall, we've been wanting to try them in a dish in our own kitchen. (The American spelling, by the way, is "Szechuan," which we totally don't understand, considering it's pronounced "SESH-wahn." To us, the British/Chinese-English spelling of "Sichuan" makes a lot more sense.)

Whether you spell it "Szechuan," "Sichuan" or, most accurately, "四川," it's a central Chinese province with a great culinary history and lots of spicy cuisine. The Sichuan peppercorns are a special treat -- lemony, sour and peppery, they have a sublte numbing effect on the tongue. We couldn't get enough of them while we were in China.

So we were excited to see this Spicy Tofu with Beef and Szechuan Peppercorns in last month's Martha Stewart Living. We ordered some peppercorns from the Internet and got to cooking.