The Bitten Word

Swordfish Puttanesca

Saveur (January 2012)

One of the best things about cooking our way through magazines is that we're always learning something new. Whether it's an ingredient, a preparation or an actual dish, we're constantly finding out about new techniques or being confronted with dishes that we have long heard about but never tried.

Puttanesca is a perfect example. We've always heard about it, but if we'd been pressed to define it, the best we would have come up with is, "It's like an Italian...sauce...right?"

Well, puttanesca, we're sorry it's taken us so long to get to know you. Where have you been all our lives?

Thanksgiving 2011: Spiced Wheat Berry Pilaf

Saveur (November 2011)

Picture a pilgrim.

Now picture that pilgrim going on a year-long yoga retreat in India and then moving into a vegans-only communal house in Berkeley, and she's super sweet, but also she's always lighting incense all over the house and insisting that you let her "clear your chakra," and it's like, okay, we get it, you lived in India, but she's actually really, really nice, like that one time she helped you build the rainwater-recycling system for the house when none of the other roommates could be bothered, and so you put up with all her sunrise om-shanti-shanti-ing because it turns out she actually did learn a thing or two in India, and she's actually kind of a really awesome cook.

That pilgrim is bringing this Spiced Wheat Berry Pilaf to Thanksgiving.

And you know what? It's pretty good! Several of our dinner guests said they really enjoyed it. But with its Eastern spices and exotic flavors and aromas that you don't normally find at a Thanksgiving feast (apricots, cumin, pistachios, cardamom), this Wheat Berry Pilaf is a decidedly alternative alternative. 

Thanksgiving 2011 Recipe Index: What the Food Magazines Are Recommending

Our Fakesgiving + Our Favorite Holiday Dishes

A little more than a week ago, we had Thanksgiving.

Or really, we had Fakesgiving, our annual tradition with friends and family where we pack as many seats as possible into our apartment, make a bunch of new dishes from November food magazines, and see what everyone likes and dislikes. This year, there were 13 of us. Zach's mom and sister came and helped cook the day before (we literally could not have done it without them), and we made 17 new Thanksgiving dishes. 

(This year's Fakesgiving crowd, minus the two of us.)

Below, you'll see the initial list of recipes we started with: more than 250 Thanksgiving recipes from 10 magazines. To be included in the index, the recipes had to be part of the magazine's Thanksgiving coverage. So this is not meant to be comprehensive -- there are many more recipes in this month's magazines. If the recipe is hyperlinked, it is available online. If not, it's not there yet. 

In preparation for this year's Thanksgiving coverage, we've also created a page of Our Favorite Holiday Recipes. There, you'll find a collection of dishes from Thanksgivings, Fakesgivings and holiday dinner parties past. We'll be updating it as we introduce new content and recipes on the site.

Enjoy the index! 

Thanksgiving 2011 Trends in Food Magazines: Pies, Pecans, Ginger and Green Beans

Thanksgiving is coming! Thanksgiving is coming!

And we're ready. We've scoured the magazines, tested recipes, and we're eager talk turkey, recommend dishes, and answer any Thanksgiving-related questions you might have.

We're kicking off our Thanksgiving coverage by looking at the trends in this year's crop of magazines. As in previous years, we've indexed every single one of the November Thanksgiving recipes from the magazines in our rotation. We'll share that list with you on Monday. There are some really exciting (and bizarre) dishes among the more than 250 recipes.

But today we're going to talk about trends. 

As we pored through this year's Thanksgiving features, some clear trends emerged. To illustrate many of the trends in this year's T-Day recipes, we created word clouds, like the one above, which illustrate how frequently certain words popped up. You can click on all the word clouds to enlarge them, so you can take a closer look. 

What's the general theme for this year? Well, for a lot of our magazines, the theme seemed to be, "Thanksgiving 2011: We're Just Not That Into You." Food & Wine and Saveur seem rather light on their coverage. Even Martha Stewart Living, which we would sort of hold up as the grande dame of Thanksgiving entertaining, seemed scaled back. (We hasten to add that we're not saying that's a bad thing -- Lord knows there are plenty of great autumn recipes out there that don't involve sweet potatoes or cranberry sauce.)

But there was one magazine that blew us away this year. You guys know we tend not to single out particular magazines or issues as favorites, but this must be said: Bon Appétit BROUGHT IT this Thanksgiving. Buh-ROUGHT. IT. From its "Feast from the East" feature, which showcased marvelous ideas for an Asian-inspired Thanksgiving, to the "Down South" feature on a Louisiana Cajun Thanksgiving feast, we were enthralled. Four turkeys, a host of awesome side dishes, and drool-worthy desserts (we need that Grape-and-Apple Pie) -- the November 2011 Bon Appétit is a pleasure. Even if you're set on your Thanksgiving menu, consider picking up a copy just for fun.

Anyway, trends.

As you can see from the word cloud above, the usual suspects are, well, the usual suspects. So here's a word cloud showing all the recipe words, minus "turkey," "gravy," "cranberry," "stuffing," "potatoes," "dressing" and "roasted" (a.k.a. the saddest Thanksgiving ever):

Pickled Shrimp

Saveur (October 2011)

Back in the summer, on one of those steamy, swampy, oppressively hot evenings that Washingtonians know so well, we went to our friends' Trevor and Owen's place for a potluck dinner. The air was thick as velvet, and all the guests arrived sweaty and bedraggled from the heat.

Then, a lifeline: Our friend Jen had brought a bowl of pickled shrimp.

We all dove in. The lemony, pickly, vinegary shrimp was the perfect antidote to the sweaty summer night. The sharp flavors of the chilled shrimp instantly cooled things off for everyone. (A libation or three didn't hurt, either.)

So when we saw this recipe for Pickled Shrimp in the latest issue of Saveur, we knew we wanted to try it out ourselves.

Contest Winners + Things That Have Caught Our Fancy

Big thanks to everyone who entered this month's contest. We loved hearing your comments about the covers!  While most people praised either the Martha Stewart Living short rib potpies, the Saveur roast beef or the Bon Appétit pork loin, we were surprised to see how much you guys loved the Whole Living cover. Dozens of you were enticed by that roasted veggie salad. 

Before we get to this month's winners, we want to highlight a few items from recent magazines that we enjoyed. 

Bourbon is our favorite spirit, so we are enamored with Saveur's current feature on bourbons and whiskeys in their October issue. It's practically a crash course in whiskeys, with tasting notes for more than 20 varieties. Needless to say, we were very thirsty after reading it. The piece -- titled "Whiskey Rebellion" -- isn't online, but as an accompaniment to the article Saveur.com has an excellent gallery of 8 whiskey cocktails.   

The same issue has a feature on fermentation that we also loved. There are recipes for everything from Spiced Red Wine Vinegar to Fermented Beets. The photos are amazing, but the thing we loved about the feature was an two-page spread called "The World of Fermentation." It highlights 30 fermented products from around the globe. Some of them are staples -- soy sauce, raw unfiltered apple cider vinegar, cultured butter. Others are foreign but familiar, like Marmite. But it's the products we've never heard of that really got us curious, like Kefir, an "effervescent milk drink from Central Asia...bubbly with yeast," and black garlic, which we've been reading a lot about lately. Have you cooked with it?

Saveur's Fermented Beets with Orange and Ginger

In Cooking Light, check out the Halloween Treat Picker, a great chart that divides candies on an axis of Sugar versus Saturated Fat, so that it highlights those items that have Less Fat & More Sugar (Nerds -- the candy, not an accusation), More Fat & More Sugar (Reese's Peanut Butter Cups), and on and on in any combination. We're not big candy eaters, but we thought this was a great Halloween tie-in.  

This same issue of Cooking Light features their annual Taste Test Awards. We love reading about taste tests in Cook's Illustrated, but few other magazines seem to do them. The two winners we're most excited to try are Bob's Red Mill Whole Grain Steel Cut Oats and the Whole Foods 365-brand Aged Balsamic Vinegar. You can explore the categories and some of the winners online. 

And lastly, there's a new food magazine of which we've become aware over the last few months. It's Chop Chop Magazine, which is focused on cooking with kids. Randomly, we both received an issue through our day jobs, and thought it was adorable. It features kids cooking and sharing their favorite recipes. If you have kids, it's definitely worth checking out.  

And now -- who won this month's giveaway?

Pesto di Noce (Walnut Pesto) with Flank Steak

Saveur (August 2011)

As people who have grown basil for the past five or so years, we are well accustomed to making pesto.

Ours has typically been the basil + Parmesan + pine nut + garlic + olive oil variety.

But honestly, we've found pine nuts a little unnerving since reading stories like this one. Plus, they're expensive. The combination of shadiness plus cost easily pushes them down our list of ingredients.

So we were eager to try this take on walnut pesto from Saveur.

Broccoli with Cheetos

Saveur (January/February 2011)

 
There's a noticeable trend right now of certain high-end chefs incorporating low-brow snack foods into their dishes. Call it a locavore backlash, or maybe just nostalgia for childhood treats. But there's definitely a streak of restaurants across the country where you're likely to see local meats and farm-sourced vegetables spiced up by things like Tang and Pop-Rocks.

Some of it, honestly, comes off as goofy stunt-food. But we were stopped in our tracks by this dish of Broccoli with Cheetos.

There's no way it could taste good, right? No. Or could it? It couldn't!  

Could it?!

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!

Thanksgiving 2010: Send Us Your Photos!

We're all done with our Thanksgiving posts! We really enjoyed trying all these recipes, and we've loved hearing from you about what you're planning to cook!

Now comes the fun part: Are you making a dish from a food magazine this year?  We'd love to feature your dish in a round-up of reader experiences after the big day. Whether you tried something new this year or you cooked some family favorites, we'd love to see your pics! Email them to us along with your thoughts on the dish and we'll post a round-up sometime after Thursday.

Below, you'll find every dish we made this year for Thanksgiving -- click on an image to read the recipe. And remember, don't lose your head on the big day.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving! We hope it's full of love, family and really, really good food.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

>> More Thanksgiving recommendations from the Bitten Word

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