The Bitten Word

Thanksgiving 2012: Gin Apple Cider

A recipe from The Bitten Word

Happy Thanksgiving Week! Have a cocktail!

This is our final Thanksgiving preview recipe.  We've told you the biggest Thanksgiving trends, cataloged all the recipes from this year's food magazines, and walked you through the 20 or so recipes we tried out ourselves.

Now it's time for a drink.

Cucumber-Lemonade Mocktail

Food & Wine (August 2012)

So.  

A mocktail.  

It's like...a cocktail, but...like...without booze?

Huh?

Oh, we kid, we kid. Sometimes a boozeless cocktail (otherwise known as, you know, a beverage) is just the thing for a refreshing sip on a hot afternoon.

We really enjoyed this Cucumber-Lemonade Mocktail, but we think the name is burying the lede.

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.

Grilled-Peach Old-Fashioned

Martha Stewart Living (July 2012)

Look, we hate to complain about taking a vacation, but here goes anyway:

Isn't the week back at work after a vacation the worst? You're digging out of hundreds of emails, scrambling to get caught up at work and all the while thinking about how this time last week you were sitting on a beach. Doesn't it just make you...want a cocktail?

Well, we certainly do. And we're looking forward to capping off this week with a nice, cool sipper. Perhaps we'll make a couple of these Grilled Peach Old-Fashioneds.

Chili-and-Cucumber Margarita

Martha Stewart Living (July 2012)

There's a Mexican place around the corner from our apartment. It actually serves authentic Oaxacan food -- think organic duck in a mole sauce or Oaxacan queso topped with fried grasshoppers.

And there's something about the place that is oh so tempting every single time we walk by. (No, it's not the grasshoppers.) It's their margarita menu. Every day the place features a different flavored margarita, temptingly described on a chalk sign out front.

Blackberry margaritas. Blood orange margaritas. Prickly pear margaritas....  Have we mentioned that we have to walk past this place every day on the way home from work? Somebody should give us a medal for not dropping in every single night.

Bad news, though: The margarita temptation has now followed us home.

Campari and Gin

inspired by Bon Appétit (June 2012)

We're fleeing town for Memorial Day weekend, off to see our friends Brian and Andrew, who recently found out that they're moving to Italy for 18 months. Needless to say, we're sad to see them go, more than a bit jealous, and eager to book a trip to visit. 

So to bid them ciao, we offer you our newly anointed cocktail of summer 2012 -- a Campari and Gin. 

Gingersnap Cocktail from Momofuku Ko

A Bitten Word Adaptation

About a year ago, we had an incredible dinner at Momofuku Ko in New York City, an amazing restaurant from the chef David Chang. The food is awesome: A fixed-price tasting menu that changes every night. Our 12-course dinner had everything from Gruyere Soup with Bone Marrow and Brioche Toast, to Mackerel and Yuzu in Orange Oil, to Slow-Roasted Duck with Mustard Greens and Honey-Braised Turnips Rolled in Pumpernickel Crumbs. 

Along with all the outrageously delicious and unique food, one of the most memorable things about the dinner was the drink pairing. Restaurants that do a tasting menu almost always offer a wine pairing to go along with the food -- a procession of glasses of wine specially selected to complement each dish. 

But at Momofuku Ko, the drink pairing is much more free-wheeling. It includes wine, beer, sake and cocktails! Their thinking is that wine isn't necessarily always the best possible pairing.

We loved the idea! And we especially loved this Gingersnap Cocktail.

Thanksgiving 2011: Cranberry-Lime Shrub Sparkler

Fine Cooking (October/November 2011)

A couple months ago, we were reading about colonial-era drink recipes. (Yes, we were just doing it for fun.)

Anyway, we came across something called a "shrub," an 18th-century American drink made with sweetened fruit and vinegar (not to be confused with a "switchel," another excellently-named vinegar-infused drink from the same time period). 

We were more than a little intrigued. Vinegar? In a cocktail? 

When we opened the Thanksgiving issue of Fine Cooking and saw a recipe for a Cranberry-Lime Shrub, we immediately added it to our Fakesgiving menu. We wanted to offer our dinner guests something special as they arrived, something fun to sip on while we finished prepping the meal.

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! 

The Rye Witch Cocktail and No-Cook Simple Syrup

Bon Appétit (October 2011)

When Clay first mentioned that he wanted to try this Rye Witch cocktail, Zach thought he was saying "wry" witch. Naturally, that evoked images of a haggard old crone making witty, dry asides, which actually sounds like a pretty great costume... 

We're always intrigued by the Halloween recipes in food magazines. Halloween is one of the few times during the year when the magazines go out of their way to have a little fun with their food. Martha dons crazy outfits, and we start to see recipes like "Broken Glass Cupcakes" from Martha Stewart Living, Spicy Cheddar Witch Fingers from Food & Wine, Ghastly Meringues from Food Network Magazine, and "I Scream" Graveyard Pie from Everyday Food.

Mostly, it's a whole lot of "cute" food. Which is great for Halloween, if that's what you want. Us? We thought this Rye Witch cocktail was more our speed. Rye whiskey and orange? Yes sir, bartender!

Plus, this recipe has a fantastic twist that we love.