The Bitten Word

Garden Update: Greens for Days

Tinkering in Our Backyard Garden

We've been away from home a lot over the last three weeks, between an adventure way down South, a trip to Kentucky for a friend's wedding, and work trips for each of us. 

With so little use, our kitchen must be feeling abandoned. Goodness knows we're ready to get back to it. 

While we've been away, and despite our neglect, our little backyard garden has been chugging along, getting a bit bigger every day. 

The squash, as you can see above, are blossoming (unfortunately we haven't been able to use the blossoms yet). Lots of big blossoms, but no actual squash just yet. We've been watching to see if they're male or female blossoms, and if we may need to pollinate the squash by hand, but so far all our blossoms are males. We will get some female blossoms, right? 

 

Eating Puerto Rico

"I think I may have to go to Puerto Rico for work." 

"Well, you're not going without me." 

As we mentioned last week, Zach recently had a work assignment for his magazine, and Clay was in need of a few days of downtime. And so we wound up spending five days in Puerto Rico; we returned a little more than a week ago. 

Have you been to Puerto Rico? We hadn't, and we had very little idea what to expect. Typically, we plan out our trips fairly well -- What's the best breakfast place near our hotel? Which museums are free on what days? But this time, thanks to both of us being very busy right up until we got on the plane, we pretty much just showed up. 

And in no time at all, we started to love San Juan.

A Little Teaser of Things to Come

This was our view last week. 

Zach went on assignment for the magazine where he works, and Clay tagged along. Needless to say, from the pic above, you can see it wasn't exactly a hardship. 

We had planned to tell you all about it today -- we ate some really amazing food and it's a trip we highly recommend. But now we're both on the road again for work and a friend's wedding. So we're leaving you with this teaser pic with the promise of more as soon as we're home. 

'Til then, we hope you have an amazing weekend. 

~ Zach & Clay 

Everything's Coming Up Green

Travails in Our Backyard Garden

Here's a short history of our gardening:

Year one: Disaster! We plant directly in the ground, learn that the bean seed packet means that the plants will grow to be not 6 to 8 inches tall, but 6 to 8 feet tall, and have beautiful plants but nearly no vegetables. But still, we love it, and are irrationally proud of our efforts. 

Year two: We get a bit smarter and actually read some gardening books. We switch to raised beds and attempt to start seeds inside our apartment during the winter months in preparation for spring. The garden starts strong, then struggles. Our yield improves, but our enthusiasm wanes. By end of summer, we're frankly glad it's over, after fretting for months about diseases, amount of sun, and how much water to give the plants. We go from being irrationally proud, to irrationally stressed out about the garden. 

Year three: We regain our resolve over the winter and go back into the garden. This time, we move our raised beds to improve the amount of light our plants will receive. We give up on growing seedlings indoors during the winter, and we order seedlings for delivery. The biggest change in year three: we buy a soaker hose and a water timer, which makes the whole thing much more zen. Trips to the garden become moments just to regard the plants, rather than obsessively water. We have carrots and tomatoes in spades. It is the year of lazy gardening. 

So here we are, year four. 

Photos from Early Spring

To round out this week, we thought we'd share a collection of photos we've snapped so far this spring. It's a bit of a rainy day here in DC, but a beautiful weekend is on the way. We hope it is wherever you are, too. 

Have an awesome weekend. Cook something delicious. And enjoy the photos!

~ Zach & Clay

 

Though this looks like a Washington, D.C. cherry blossom photo, it was actually snapped outside of 1892 East Restaurant in Huntsville, Alabama. We flew down there to meet Zach's family a few weeks ago, and spring had already arrived. We loved 1892 (our first visit) and have been thinking about their take on Shrimp and Grits -- a butterflied shrimp, stuffed with grits, then deep friend and served with a tomato dipping sauce. Needless to say: delicious. 

 

While we were visiting Zach's family (they live in Tennesee, but it's usually cheaper for us to fly into Huntsville), we went to a cookout hosted by one of Zach's mom's colleagues. He lives on a farm outside Lynchburg (home of Jack Daniel's). This shot of Clay from that cookout is about as Tennessee as it gets -- barn, beer and a chicken.

Our Menu Collection

About five years ago -- around the same time we started this blog -- we also started collecting menus.

We were visiting some great restaurants, and we really wanted to remember the meals. So we got in the habit of asking for a copy of the menu before leaving the restaurant. That turned into habit, and since then, we've amassed quite a stack of menus representing memorable meals.

We went digging for something in the menu stack the other day, and got lost browsing through the dishes and thinking about the food, remembering either what we ate, or who we were with. We thought you might like to see some of the menus and hear the stories. 

Here are a few of our favorites.

 

 

momofuku noodle bar - New York City - February 14, 2010

A few years ago, we somehow ended up in New York City on Valentine's Day -- with no dinner reservation and no plans. We decided to use the opportunity to make our first visit to momofuku noodle bar, and had an excelelnt time slurping ramen and diving into those legendary steamed pork buns. A Valentine's to remember. 

 

 

 

Hundred Acres - New York City - June 20, 2009 

We had been to see the most amazing production of Our Town at an Off-Broadway theater in the West Village, and we made a late dinner reservation at Hundred Acres in SoHo. It was one of those absolutely perfect nights -- we loved the food and it was an incredibly romantic meal. There was even a near-marriage proposal (but that ultimately happened several months later). And all thanks to Thornton Wilder. 

 

 

New Uses for Clementine Boxes

This time of year, we eat winter citrus like our lives depended on it.

Each week, we go through at least one five-pound box of clementines. We pack them on workdays for a midday snack, and at night we gobble them up after dinner as dessert.

Most of the time, we buy Darling Clementines, which come in simple wooden crates.

We love the zingy citrus, but we hate discarding all those great little boxes. So rather than just tossing them in the trash, we've found that old clementine boxes can be quite useful around the house.

Here's how we use reuse and recycle clementine boxes. 

50 Things We've Learned in 5 Years of Writing The Bitten Word

Well, here we are: It's our blogiversary, marking five (five!) years of writing The Bitten Word. 

A year ago, when we embarked on year five, we asked you to introduce yourselves, and we loved hearing from folks all over the world. If you haven't commented there yet, please do. They really make our day. 

This year, to mark the beginning of our sixth year of blogging, we thought we'd take a look back and share 50 Things We've Learned in 5 Years of Writing The Bitten Word. 

Here they are. 

1. Ingredients recommended by food magazines can be extremely difficult to find. This was the lesson from our very first recipe we posted, Pork Cheek and Black-Eyed Pea Chili. 

2. The Bittens -- that's right, you -- are a vast source of kitchen knowledge and eager to help us and others. In the comments of our very first post, we were astounded that someone asked a question about where to find pork belly in Cleveland, and another person quickly answered. Moments like this, of great, positive community, have been the highlight of these five years of blogging. 

3. Good food photography takes practice. One area where we've improved a lot is photography. Looking back at our first year of blogging, we shudder a bit at our photos. (Exhibit A.) As we've photographed more, we've learned some tricks of trade. Our equipment is slightly nicer now, but it's small things (natural light, a tripod) and practice that have really made a difference.

4. Food magazines -- like us -- are not infallible. Just as we make mistakes in the kitchen, every recipe featured in a food magazine is not perfect. We've had our share of disasters. Some have been our fault, others are due to faulty recipes. Our very first dud was a Banana Creme Pie from Bon Appétit. But there have been many, many more. 

5. White Lily flour makes the best biscuits. (Actually, we knew that long before we wrote it down.)

6. After trying countless roast chickens, Ina Garten's Lemon and Garlic Roast Chicken is still our favorite roast chicken recipe. We're suckers for the gravy.

7. Chocolate Gravy brings people together. That post has generated the most lovely notes and emails from people who also grew up eating it, and who write in to tell us about their family's version of the dish.

8. The people who work at food magazines are incredibly supportive of writers like us. We've heard from nearly all the magazines we cover at one point or another, with notes and comments about the dishes we write about from their magazines. 

9. Don't cook the berries. One thing we learned early on is that the food that comes out of your kitchen is not necessarily going to look like the photo in the magazine. Some of it will -- but a lot of it won't. Food photographers employ a lot of tricks, including undercooking certain elements of the food, in order to make them look prettier in the magazine. Case in point.

Bay Leaves: Worthless or Wonderful? Plus: Pressure-Cooker Chicken Stock

We have long been ambivalent about bay leaves.

When we mentioned offhand that we "sort of don't believe in" bay leaves as part of the note down within a recipe late last year, we were surprised by how many comments we received coming to the bay leaf's defense. Many of you wanted to know how the herb had done us wrong.

Here's how we fell out of love with bay leaves, and how we did a test this week to determine if we're just flat-out wrong. 

When we try out a new recipe, we are, for the most part, dutiful recipe followers. If a recipe calls for an obscure ingredient, we will hunt it down, even if that means multiple grocery store stops and lots of phone calls. And, because many recipes over the years have called for bay leaves, we've always purchased them, always fresh, never dried.

Here's how it always seems to go with bay leaves: We buy a pack and use one or two bay leaves in a recipe. We're never sure what contribution the leaf is making. We can barely smell it on its own, much less detect it in a soup, stew or broth. Nonetheless, we toss it in, per the recipe. The rest of the pack sits unused in the fridge until the leaves become brittle. We trash the old dead leaves. Next time there's a recipe that calls for bay leaves? Wash, rinse, repeat.

But the notes we got from you guys -- how you love bay leafs and consider them essential -- got us thinking. Are we wrong about bay leaves? Have we been "meh" on them for naught?

We decided to find out the best way we knew how. We made chicken stock. 

Our Favorite Meals and Restaurants in San Francisco

We love living in our nation's capital, but it's a fairly transient city. We frequently get asked, "Are you staying in DC? Moving away?"

We plan to stay put. Over the decade that we've been here, the city has just gotten better and better. We've made close friends, the city itself just keeps getting more beautiful and the food and restaurants improve every year. 

All that said, if we were going to move, it would likely be to San Francisco (or maybe, if we suddenly feel the need to drive a lot, Los Angeles). Is there anywhere better to eat than in San Francisco? Perhaps New York, but that's a debate for another time.

 

 

It had been a few years since we visited San Fran, but Zach recently had a work trip scheduled out there, and Clay tagged along. So we spent a long weekend wandering around the city's various neighborhoods, meeting up with friends for coffee and drinks, and desperately trying to work up enough of an appetite to justify our next meal. 

Here are our favorite meals, dishes and experience: 

Pizzas and Pastas at Flour + Water in the Mission.

This was one of our favorite meals of the trip. We went with our friends Mark & Michelle, showed up early expecting to have to wait a long time, but were immediately seated. We ordered a two pizzas, a pasta, and two "secondi." Everything we ate at Flour + Water was out of this world.