The Bitten Word

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. 

Nigella's Chocolate Fruit Cake

We're back from China!

We just arrived home yesterday, and once we're fully unpacked and have downloaded all our photos, we'll share some tales with you. Needless to say, it was a wonderful and adventurous few weeks away. Now we're both eager to get back into the kitchen and take a break from our endless parade of noodles and dumplings and rice. 

It seems that the Christmas season exploded while we were gone. Greeting us at the airport were sparkly trees, big faux packages and holiday songs on the loudspeaker. The houses up and down our block are already done up in strings of lights and festive wreaths. 

So, mere hours back from our trip, we already have holiday cooking on the mind. And for us, holiday cooking involves one recipe that we're eager to return to each year: Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Fruit Cake.

Eat This Now! 6 Dishes to Make Before the End of Summer

Kids, we've got a little bit of bad news: Summer is nearly over.

But you've still got a little time! Meteorologically speaking, you've got 23 days. And even if you count Labor Day as the end of summer, you still have the better part of a week.

One good use of these waning days? Cook up a favorite summer dish!

We scrolled through our recipe index to round up 6 Summer Dishes that you should definitely make before fall. They're some of our all-time favorites!

 

Raw Corn and Zucchini Salad: This salad is simple, fresh and bursting with flavor. It's the taste of summer in a single bite!

 

 

 

 

 

Sweet and Spicy Fried Peach Pies: There's literally not a single word in the name of this dish that we don't love.

 

 

 

 

Pan-Roasted Corn and Okra: Just four ingredients: corn, okra, oil and salt. It doesn't get simpler, or tastier.

 

 

 

 

 

Best BBQ Chicken with Simple Barbecue Sauce: This is one of the most popular posts we've ever had on The Bitten Word, and for good reason. This dish is a knockout!

 

 

 

Basil-Blackberry Crumble: A crumble is just about the most perfect summer dessert you can find. We've made dozens of variations of this recipe over the past three years. Pick your favorite summer fruit, and get to crumblin'! 

 

 

 

Burgers with Blue Cheese Mayonnaise and Sherry Vidalia Onions: This is probably our favorite burger we've ever made. Sweet, smoky and tangy all in one bite!

 

 

 

 

As for us, we're heading to the beach for a loooong Labor Day week with a houseful of friends. We've got sunscreen, a stack of unread magazines and a bag full of books. We'll do some cooking, and we just may have a cocktail or two.

We'll see you in a week -- it's going to be a fantastic autumn! 

 

 

 

 

Dorie Greenspan's "Visitandine," or Your New Favorite Strawberry Shortcake

Adapted From Around My French Table

Here's a tip: Before you start cooking any recipe -- or really, before you even go shopping for the components of a recipe -- read the full instructions all the way through.

Not that we're good about following that advice ourselves. Time and again, we find ourselves barreling toward the end of a dish, and suddenly -- ohhhhh, cripes! -- "Let rest for 90 minutes before proceeding to next step." 

We were glad to see this tip, submitted by Chef John Besh, included in Food Network Magazine's terrific May feature, "The 100 Greatest Cooking Tips of All Time." It bears repeating: "Take the time to actually read recipes through before you begin."

Of course, sometimes things turn out okay. In fact, not heeding that advice led us to make this strawberry shortcake. More on that in a moment.

But first: strawberries. 

Strawberry season is upon us, at least in our neck of the woods. If you're south of our nation's capital, you no doubt already have them by the bushels. Folks up north: Hold tight! They're coming. Our CSA kicked off this week, with a small quantity of strawberries, but it sounds like a bunch more are on their way to Chez Bitten Word. 

We have some favorite recipes we'll revisit, like Strawberry Dumplings, or maybe this Strawberry-Citrus Salad. We also love making Freezer Jams, so that we have all that deliciousness on hand year-round (or at least as long as we can ration it). 

And then there's shortcake. 

We've made a handful of strawberry shortcakes here on the blog, our favorite being these Balsamic and Brown Sugar Strawberry Shortcakes. The compote was our own, but the shortcake itself was from Everyday Food, and it was very good.  

But it looks as if we may have found a new favorite shortcake recipe. 

Our 10 Favorite Food Magazine Recipes of the Past Year

                                      

Here at the beginning of a new year, we've been thinking a lot about the past 12 months of The Bitten Word, and about the dishes that we really loved.  

So we made a list of our 10 Favorite Food Magazine Recipes of the Past Year. And that exercise was a complete failure, because we just couldn't narrow it down to 10!

So after we cut out as many as we could stomach, there are 13 dishes on the list. We hope you'll forgive us.  

We were surprised to find that once our list was made, nearly all of the magazines we cover were represented.  Fine Cooking, Bon Appétit, Everyday Food and Cook's Illustrated each had two recipes on the list.  Southern Living, Martha Stewart Living, Cook's Country, Food Network and Saveur each had one recipe each. Surprisingly, Food & Wine isn't on the list, even though we really liked several dishes we made from their pages.

Making this list also reminded us that we learned some fun new words this year, including sformato, larding, and affogato. More on those in the list below. 

So here they are, Our 10, uh, we can't possibbly choose only 10, so 13 Favorite Food Magazine Recipes of 2010 (in the order that we cooked them): 

• Crispy Potato Roast from Everyday Food: "We don't want to overstate how good this Crispy Potato Roast is...but it will forever and irreversibly alter your life." 

• Indoor Pulled Pork from Cook's Illustrated: "This pulled pork tastes like it came from the best, divey-est Memphis BBQ shack." 

• Cajun Red Beans and Rice from Cook's Illustrated: "The beans are soft and creamy, while the andouille sausage is spicy and hands-down amazing."

• Korean Fried Chicken from Saveur:  "Spicy and sweet with the promise of a crispy, crackly skin? We were sold! ...This fried chicken is absolutely one of the best things we've made in a very long time."

Read the rest after the jump!

Canning Tomatoes How-To: Tomatoes Packed in Water

We had quite an adventure last week in canning our tomatoes. Though we've posted a video detailing that (very, very long) night, we thought some readers might like to see a step-by-step process of how we did it, and what we used.

The biggest change between this year's canning and our previous efforts is a change in method. Two years ago, we used a hot-pack method, meaning that the tomatoes themselves were cooked prior to being placed in the jars.

This year, we opted to skip that step and do a raw-pack method, meaning that the tomatoes go into the jars raw, and boiling water is then added.  It was this method (and skipping the cooking step) that allowed us to do 90 pounds of tomatoes in 7 hours. If we had done the cooking step, it likely would have taken us all night to complete the canning process.

So come along on our raw-pack canning adventure! At the bottom of this post, you'll find the full recipe that we used, along with the video of our rollicking night, in case you missed it earlier. And between here and there, you'll find a bunch of photos that show each step of the way.

Compost Cookies with Cereal-Milk Panna Cotta

Clay had a birthday recently! Yay!

We celebrated by having our friends Drew and Ralph over for a nice dinner at home. You may recall the parade of great dishes we made for Clay's b-day last year. This year, we kept things simple, with a grilled Kansas City brisket (which we'll post about soon!) and fresh summer veggies.

But Zach wanted to do something really special as a surprise for dessert. It took him about 3 seconds to decide on Compost Cookies with Cereal-Milk Panna Cotta.

Chocolate Sabayon With Sea Salt and Olive Oil, and Homemade Nutter Butters

Last fall, our friends Drew and Ralph spent a weekend in Chicago. Drew and Ralph are both big-time foodies, and they asked us for any food recommendations in the Windy City. We had a few (Ann Sather, Rick Bayless' Frontera Grill). 

And we knew the perfect person to ask for more ideas: one of our readers, Rina. She'd sent us numerous great recipe ideas before, and we knew she was really plugged in to the Chicago food scene. Rina was happy (we hope!) to oblige, and she sent a terrific list of good restaurants for Drew and Ralph to try.

At the top of Rina's picks? The Bristol, a new gastropub in Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood. Rina raved about its creativity and constantly changing menu. And when Drew and Ralph went there for brunch, they fell in love with the place.

All that brings us to this: When Zach was in Chicago for work a couple weeks ago, he knew he had to make time for dinner at the Bristol.

Dinner was outstanding: An appetizer of charred spring onions tossed with crispy goat belly, topped with a light mustard cream sauce. The entree was a crisp-skinned sea trout on a bed of fava beans and flageolets. Perfection!

But then it was time for dessert.

The server came over to tell Zach the three dessert options that evening. "First," she said, "we have a chocolate sabayon, sprinkled with a little sea salt and drizzled with olive oil, and that's served with a couple house-made Nutter Butter cookies. Second, we have--"

"I'm sorry," Zach interrupted. "I'm going to stop you there. There is absolutely no need for you to continue. I have to order that."

After eating the dessert and blacking out for a while over how good it was, Zach came to. And he had a singular mission: recreating this dessert at home.

Gus's Fried Chicken

Saveur (Issue #11)

Swimsuit season be damned, we're on a fried chicken tear right now.

For the past three weekends, we've somehow managed to have fried chicken for lunch at a different place every Saturday. And we're not talking your run-of-the-mill fast food chicken. We've been eating some quality chicken. In fact, we've been eating some of the best fried chicken we've ever had.

One of those meals was in Memphis. We touched down in the Land of the Delta Blues a couple weeks ago for Zach's stepsister's wedding. We actually have several good friends in Memphis, and we go whenever we can. We love Memphis -- it's a really great town, with some really great food.

People think of Memphis a BBQ mecca, and rightly so.  There are tons of good barbecue places, and a few really terrific ones.

But if you think Memphis is all just ribs and sauce, you're missing out. There's at least one other must-have meal in the city, one that will just maybe change your life.

That meal is a plate of fried chicken from Gus's.

West Virginia Weekend: The Bacon Explosion

Our friends Scott and Charlie invited us to join them and some other friends at their cabin in West Virginia this past weekend. We jumped at the chance to head to the country, unplug and spend a few days with friends.

Little did we know that a culinary adventure also awaited us in wild, wonderful West Virginia.

You see, our friend Charlie had a dream--a dream of hope, of peace and of multiple types of cured pork products.

His dream? To make the Bacon Explosion.

You may have read about the Bacon Explosion, invented by BBQAddicts.com. It's been lauded as "the BBQ Sausage Recipe of All Recipes" and has been much discussed online. The recipe was even featured in the New York Times earlier this year. 

It's not for the faint of heart. (If you don't believe us, just check out the "bacon weave" in Step 1.)  And, oddly, it's one of those rare recipes that actually appears less and less appetizing the closer it gets to being done.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.  Come join us, won't you, on a voyage to pork nirvana.