The Bitten Word

Sparkling Rum Punch

Southern Living (December 2012)

A couple days ago, we mentioned that it's the season for sweets.

That's true, but it's also the season of the champagne toast. Between the first raising of your glass at Thanksgiving dinner and the last mimosa toast on New Year's Day morning, there's enough "cheersing" going on to give you tennis elbow.

Here's a fun sparkling wine cocktail to mix things up. It's an unexpected combination of rum, orange and sparkling wine. 

Rum and orange juice sounds like something a pre-motherhood Snooki would've drunk with breakfast. But rum, orange juice and sparkling wine? That, friends, is a classy combination. 

This sparkling rum punch is a festive, sweet concoction, just the sort of thing you want to be able to whip up on a whim during the holidays when friends are coming by.

Cheers! 

Cajun Chicken Cassoulet

Southern Living (December 2012)

Playwrights often use the metaphor of Chekhov's gun: If you're going to introduce a gun in the first act, it'd better be fired by the end of the play. 

The same goes for recipe titles. In this case, if you're going to use the word "Cajun," there'd better be a pay-off in terms of spice.

This Cajun Chicken Cassoulet simply doesn't have enough spice. But we'll get to that in a moment.

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.

Beef-and-Watermelon Stir-fry

Southern Living (August 2012) 

Cooking with watermelon is a new idea for us. We're obsessed with it raw, or in a salad, or in a cocktail. But in a stir-fry? When we spied the beautiful photo of this dish in the most recent Southern Living, we were instantly a bit dubious. Would the watermelon hold up against the beef, snow peas and other more traditional stir-fry components? Would the flavors work?

We had to try it for ourselves. 

Stovetop Chicken Pie

Southern Living (February 2011)

Maybe you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

But should you judge a recipe by its ingredients?

We frequently do, although we try not to. 

As we select recipes to try, we're always trying to keep an open mind, regardless of the recipe's ingredients or techniques. 

And so it was with this Stovetop Chicken Pie from Southern Living. It's part of a regular "Momma's Way versus Your Way" feature, in which the magazine offers both a classic dish and an updated version.

In this case, the classic dish is a traditional double-crust chicken pot pie, which looks truly phenomenal. The updated version -- the one we tried-- is made on the stovetop (sans crust), and then, to save time in the kitchen, is spooned over biscuits. 

So does it work? And what exactly gave us pause about the ingredients?

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!

Flourless Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip Cookies

Southern Living (December 2010)

The two of us have a lot in common when it comes to food. We have similar tastes, we're both willing to eat just about anything, and we have a penchant for selecting the exact same dishes on a restaurant menu (if only that was a game show, we'd be shoe-ins!). 

In fact, the places where our palates differ are few, and mostly center around dill (Clay doesn't hate it but isn't a huge fan) and mushrooms (Zach's still trying to get on board). 

But the one thing we agree on more strongly than anything else? 

It's an undying, passionate love for the combination of chocolate and peanut butter.  Chocolate and peanut butter together is our weakness, our craving, our happy place we'd visit over and over and over again.

We've made plenty of dishes featuring this combo here on the blog.  At the bottom of this post, you can see a list of our four favorite PB-and-chocolate recipes. 

So when we got on a little cookie-making kick last week, starting with Snow-Capped Macaroons, Southern Living had our number with their recipe for Flourless Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Potato Gratin with Rosemary Crust

Southern Living (December 2010)

The holidays call for show-stopper dishes.

We're thinking big beef tenderloins, glorious fresh-baked breads and towering cakes: the kinds of dishes that are brought out to the dining room "with quiet pride," as Nigella would say, to be met with oohs and ahhs.

What we're not thinking when we think about show-stoppers? 

Potatoes. 

We whip them, we bake them, we smash them. Sometimes, we arrange them all funny in a pan and bake them till their crispy, which is wonderful, but still isn't quite a show-stopper.

Well, get ready to see potatoes in a whole new light, because this Potato Gratin with Rosemary Crust is one of our new favorite dishes.

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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Thanksgiving 2010: What the Food Magazines Are Recommending

A Bitten Word Round-Up of 175 Recipes from 10 Leading Food Magazines

As we said yesterday, we've got tons of great Thanksgiving dishes to share with you. But before we get to our Thanksgiving parade of recipes, we wanted to post our annual round-up of all the T-Day recipes from all the food magazines we receive.

Last year, we said that if we were to assign a trend to the 2009 Thanksgiving issues, it would be about simplicity.  

This year, that trend seems even more extreme. This year's food mags are all trumpeting "simple," "easy," "foolproof," "no-time," "Thanksgiving 101" recipes.

Still, we did find a handful of really innovative dishes -- notably, in Food & Wine's "East by Northeast" Thanksgiving spread, which features an Asian-American meal that incorporates Eastern flavors and traditional Thanksgiving dishes. We also lusted after Martha Stewart Living's "Land of Plenty" feature, which showcased a farm-to-table Thanksgiving dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. It's the Thanksgiving we most wanted to attend (maybe because it started off with Hudson Baby Bourbon Whiskey?).

We noticed a few micro-trends this year, too. Despite the beautiful slices of pie that adorn the cover of Martha Stewart Living, it's cakes that seem really popular this year. And especially pumpkin layer cakes -- three different magazines feature one this year.

Other ingredients that are big this year? Pomegranates are everywhere. As is fennel. Both of those are nice ways to add a new flavor into standard Thanksgiving dishes.

What's out? Corn, believe it or not. Other than cornbread stuffings and a couple of soups from Saveur, there's only one dish in all these food magazines that includes corn (Food & Wine's Creamed Haricot Vert and Corn Casserole).

Which ingredients stood out the most this year? Using Wordle.net, we created a couple of interesting word clouds that display the different ingredients in all these recipes according to how often they appear.

Here's a word cloud showing every prominent ingredient:

And here's one where we omitted all the usual suspects (turkey, stuffing, etc.):

Anyway, onto the master index!