The Bitten Word

The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Challenge: Here's the Plan!

Wow! We apparently underestimated how many of you would join The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Challenge....

We said on Monday that we'd need at least 60 people, and we got more than five times that!

Super. Exciting. 

We had planned to put the magazines to a vote in order to decide which issue we'd use. But we hate to leave anybody out, so here's what we're going to do. We're capping The Cover-to-Cover Challenge at 350 participants (there are about 30 slots left). If you haven't already signed up, you can by leaving a comment on Monday's blog post. Readers are going to be divided into six teams.

Why six teams?

Because we're going to cook every recipe in six issues of our favorite October food magazines! Each of you will be assigned to one of the following: 

• Team Everyday Food (comfort food issue)
• Team Saveur (100 classic recipes)
• Team Bon Appetit (Family Style Feasts)
• Team Food & Wine (the wine issue -- don't worry, you don't have to make your own wine)
• Team Martha Stewart Living (the flavors of fall)
• Team Food Network Magazine (soups & stews, sandwiches & Fall-ness)

There will be Halloween food. There will be ethnic dishes. There will be layer cakes. There will be a ton of fun. 

So here's what happens next:

• By the end of the week we plan to have made dish assignments. 
• Each team will get a detailed email explaining what they need to do.
• We're going to all cook-cook-cook and then showcase what we did later in October. 

Sound good? We're excited. 

Come back tomorrow, when we'll resume our regularly scheduled program.

We're ready to cook some Fall dishes!

The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Challenge: Will You Join Us?

We have a running list of things we'd like to do here on the blog -- some of them we get to in short order, while some of them languish in Google doc purgatory.

One that's been on that list for a long time is to attempt to cook every recipe in a single issue of a food magazine over the course of a month. What would it be like to make 60+ new recipes in a month? And what would we learn from the experience?

Well, we still think it's a great idea, but every time it comes up, we balk because the month is too busy. But then we had an epiphany: What if you cooked along with us?!

So we're enlisting you, dear Bittens. Come on board for The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Challenge!

September Tomatoes, Weddings, and a Project

It seems that every time we step out into the garden, we come back with a little handful of tomatoes. The garden, which seemed a few weeks to be on its way out, is suddenly bursting with tomatoes and peppers. There isn't much else happening back there, but we don't mind. These late summer tomatoes are keeping us plenty happy.  

The tomatoes are sitting on our counter in little dishes. There are quite a few them at this point, even though we keep popping them like candy. With a nip in the air, it may be time to roast them and toss them with a simple pasta. If not, there are always heirloom salads and pairing them with meats.

This weekend, two of our closest friends are getting married. Clay is a groomsman and Zach is singing (did you know he sings?). It has us thinking about our wedding, which was just over two years ago. (Time flies!) We celebrated our anniversary earlier this week. We kept it simple for our "cotton" anniversary and made dinner at home. Unromantically, the entire meal was built around the theme of "things that are about to go bad." But we had a nice bottle of wine and enjoyed a night in, and it made us very happy. 

Next week we're going to announce a fun project for you to do with us in October. We're excited about the idea, and we hope you will be, too. It's going to require you to cook something -- we know you're going to hate that. 

Have a great weekend. Buy some apples. If it gets chilly where you are, haul out a sweater. We'll see you on Monday.

-- Zach & Clay 

 

Photos From Summer: County Fairs, Nashville Hot Chicken, and Questionable Facial Hair

 

Hello, Bittens!

We're off to the beach for a few days to unplug, drink some of these, and tear through a major stack of books we're hauling with us. Before we go, we wanted to share a selection of photos and stories from this summer. 

Thank you for spending time with us this summer, for your comments, your encouragement and your general awesomeness. 

Enjoy the photos below, and we'll see you in a week!

-- Clay and Zach 

 

 

This photo and the one at the top of this post are from the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair in Maryland. We went on a whim with five other friends one Saturday night. We rode carnival rides, checked out some livestock, and ate our weight in fried foods. Prepare yourself for some fried intensity. 

August Garden Update: Just One Tomato

An Update on Our Backyard Garden

We've harvested exactly one full-size tomato so far this year. 

That's right: one. 

The loneliest number. 

And really, we're fine with that. 

Seriously. 

No really.

Save us your pity.

We've been happily drowning in tomatoes, eating our fill, and making tons of sauce. Granted, those tomatoes aren't from our garden, but still.

You see, we're perfectly happy with how things have gone in our garden this summer. 

More Adventures in Tomato Canning

As we mentioned a couple weeks ago, we're in the middle of full-on canning season. About 10 days ago, our CSA added tomatoes to its unlimited U-pick list. And that was all we needed: We reserved a Zipcar for the next morning, and by 6 a.m. last Friday, we were standing in the middle of rows and rows of fragrant tomato plants.

You guys know the drill with canning tomatoes, and hopefully you've seen the (epic!) film. But we wanted to share some snapshots from our 2012 tomato-canning experience. It covered the better part of the weekend. (Thanks to a carbon monoxide alarm scare, we had to abort the process midway through and clear out while we waited for a technician to come check out the stove. It turned out to be a false alarm, which is what we'd figured. But when two different carbon monoxide detectors in your house start emitting warnings, well, you pay attention.)

Anyway, enjoy all the action of our 2012 tomato-canning adventure. Come for the bloodbath!  Stay for the 29 quarts of successfully canned tomatoes!

Your Questions: Why Feature a Bad Recipe?

When we shared our post about State Fair Ham Loaf a few weeks ago, we received this very good question from a reader named Mindy:

Guys - I love your site! But why go to the trouble of devoting a column to "eww, this is nasty, but here's the recipe" when there are so many wonderful recipes out there yet to be discovered?  

That, Mindy, is an excellent question.

Tastebuds on the Move

Bittens, our tastes are changing. 

Perhaps it's because we're just being fearless eaters (or -- gulp -- because we're getting older), but we've noticed lately that we're beginning to love some tastes we previously disliked, and becoming more tolerant of others. 

And we're not talking about childhood food phobias of the "I refuse to try that" variety. We each had plenty of those. Clay had never tasted a fresh tomato until he went to college; Zach had a major aversion to creamy products like sour cream and mayonnaise. Both of these things have long fallen by the wayside as we've grown up and become more adventurous eaters. 

Down to the Last Three Jars

Reflections on Canning Tomatoes, A Year Later

Canning season is upon us. We can tell because every time around this year, we start getting comments and notes from readers who are gearing up for their own canning projects. That's one of the things that thrills us most about sharing kitchen stories with you -- when you in turn tell us about your own experiences.   

Last year we canned tomatoes. It was our third time to do full-scale tomato canning, yielding about 30 quarts in one (very long) night's worth of work. We followed the same hot-packing method that we outlined in a 2010 video we think is pretty humorous. 

Well it looks like the timing of everything worked out pretty well: Just as canning season has come back around, we also happen to have eaten through almost all of the jars we canned last year. In fact, there are only 3 small pints left, the rest lost to soups, sauces, stews and any number of dishes that called for canned tomatoes. If a recipe this year called for tomatoes, we reached for a jar of our own handiwork.  

We often look at cooking in terms of, "Was this worth it?" We don't mean in terms of expense (though we try to watch that, too). We mean whether the end result justifies the time and effort involved. And just as we do with everything else, we think it's fair to ask: Is canning tomatoes worth it?  

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.