The Bitten Word

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

 

 

 

Roast Leg of Lamb with Apples and Fennel

Saveur (December 2012)

Just the other day we were saying that you don't need to worry about things being perfect when you serve them at the dinner table -- especially at the holidays, when things can get a little crazy.

We meant that. But come on. Isn't there still a little part of you that still wants that perfection? Especially at the holidays?

Don't you still fantasize just a little bit about striding triumphantly to a table full of applauding guests, carrying a huge platter laden with roast holiday fare? Like Charles Dickens meets Norman Rockwell meets Martha Stewart?

We'll totally cop to that ourselves. 

And guess what? With this Roast Leg of Lamb with Apples and Fennel, you're well on your way to that Dickensian Rockwellian Stewartian vision of holiday perfection. The good news is, it's darn easy. 

Thanksgiving 2012: Hominy, Oyster, and Sausage Dressing

Saveur (November 2012)

One thing we love about Thanksgiving issues of food magazines are the regional features you often see. You know what we mean: "Thanksgiving Comes to Napa," or "A Southwest Celebration of Thanks," or "A Traditional Pan-Asian Hawaiian Turkey Feast By Way Of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan." Those features.

This year, our favorite was Saveur's lovely spread about celebrating Thanksgiving on the Chesapeake Bay. We highly recommend you take time to read the first-person narrative by historian Bernard Herman. Maybe it's because we're Chesapeake-adjacent ourselves, but we were really enamored by that feature. We want to go live inside that Thanksgiving. 

And it was that Chesapeake feature that convinced us to try a new take on oyster dressing. 

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

Saveur Magazine Cover-To-Cover: All the Recipes in the October 2012 Issue

Part 5 of The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Project

When we first made the decidion to expand the Cover-to-Cover Project to several magazines, we knew there was one that would be on the extreme end of the scale. The October 2012 issue of Saveur is a doozy. To celebrate the magazine's 150th issue, the editors compiled a definitive list of 101 "classic recipes."

But if you're familiar with Saveur, you know they didn't stick with "classic" dishes from the American table. Oh sure, there's a recipe for Buffalo Wings, and New England Clam Chowder, and Baked Alaska. But the list also includes dishes like Chawanmushi, Hongshao Qiezi, Coquilles St-Jacques, rösti and Djaj Mqualli. You know, those classics.

Team Saveur was ready! Armed with exotic ingredients and unfamiliar recipes, they churned out a wildly impressive global buffet. Way to go, Team Saveur!

Which of these "classic" dishes do you want to make?

Any "classics" you think were omitted?

Let us know in the comments!

 

EGGS AND BREAKFAST DISHES | CHILIS, SOUPS AND STEWS | SALADS AND APPETIZERS  | FISH, MEAT AND VEGETARIAN MAINS  | SIDES  | DESSERTS AND SWEETS | CONDIMENTS

Chicken with Puebla-Style Mole Sauce

Saveur (September 2012)

The September issue of Saveur is a doozy. The Mexico Issue, which is obviously devoted to south-of-the-border cuisine, is one of those magazine issues that you want to file away and keep. It's almost more of a reference book on Mexican cooking, laying out the ingredients, flavors, kitchen tools and preparations that define that kind of cuisine (and the different regional cuisines within Mexico). It's great.

For some reason, out of all the choices in the issue, we were really drawn to the recipe for chicken in mole sauce. Neither of us was too familiar with mole. We've never ordered it in a Mexican restaurant, although we're sure we've tasted it when others have ordered it.

In fact, when we started thinking about it, we could only think two things about mole: "Isn't that that chocolate sauce that goes on meat? And doesn't it have, like, a ton of ingredients?"

Answer: Yes. And yes. 

Mole does in fact have a lot of ingredients. Twenty-four, in this recipe (not including the chicken). And a lot of them are Mexican ingredients that we thought would be hard to source -- pasilla chiles, canela cinnamon, piloncilo sugar, Mexican chocolate.

We almost skipped the whole affair. But then we thought, "Hold up! We live in the second-most heavily Hispanic neighborhood in D.C., and adjacent to the most heavily Hispanic. We can do this!"

So we hopped on our bikes and went on a hunt.

State Fair Ham Loaf

Saveur (June/July 2012)

Fried Coke. Fried Oreos. Fried butter. Fried ... everything?

Let's face it, state fair food does not have a good reputation. And for seemingly good reason. The "breaking food news" that emerges from state fairs is all about novelty and a race to figure out what extreme item can make it into the deep fryer next. 

Unfortunately, this State Fair Ham Loaf isn't going to redeem that reputation any time soon. 

Stuff We Like: John's Premium Tonic Syrup

While we were at the beach up in Provincetown, Mass. a few weeks ago, we popped into Perry's, a little deli and wine shop we like to visit when we're there. Besides booze, they sell a lot of premium food products -- think high end pastas, oils and pickles. 

On the front table in the store, we saw these tiny little dark bottles, with beautiful white labels: "John's Premium Tonic Syrup." 

We asked the owner about John's, and he started raving about how "it makes the best gin and tonic I've ever had."

We had to try it. So we picked up a bottle and hauled it back to our tiny little rental to give it a spin.