The Bitten Word

Charred Tomato Vinaigrette

Food & Wine (August 2015)

Never fear, Bittens! We're still here.

We've just been away on vacation in Cape Cod for the past few weeks. 

Here's our vacation by the numbers:

• Beach bonfire with friends: 1 
• Run-ins with Bitten Word readers who said hi: 2
• Jars of peanut butter: 2
• Bags of Cape Cod chips: 4
• Novels read: 4
• Lobster rolls eaten: 8
• Issues of the New Yorker read (finally): 12 
• Days on the beach: 13
• Oysters: 24
• Spf: 30
• Seals spotted: >50 
• Head clearance of the house we stayed in: 5' 10"
• Glasses of rosé consumed: Innumerable 

 

It was a decadent, hilarious, fun-filled few weeks with friends.

But now we're back. Back to sanity. Back to the gym. Back to healthy(ish) eating. Back to (thankfully) more summer. 

After a big few weeks, it's time to get back in touch with our good old friend Salad.

And we turned to this Charred Tomato Vinaigrette to help reintroduce us. 

Flank Steak Peperonata

Cook's Country (February/March 2015)

 

At the end of each year, we write about our favorite recipes we've made over the previous 12 months. (Here's our 10 Favorite Recipes from 2014, and here's the 10 Favorite Recipes from 2013.)

Well, it may only be the beginning of March, but we've already got one dish that is sure to make our year-end list: This Flank Steak Peperonata from Cook's Country.

It is, in a word, fantastic.

The 10 Best Food Magazine Recipes We Made in 2014 -- Plus Our 5 Other Favorite Dishes

   

    

   

Happy New Year, Bittens!

We are so excited to start cooking in 2015!  But first let's take a quick look back at 2014.

In our ongoing quest to test-drive food magazine recipes, we tried out a lot of dishes last year. Some were good; some were duds. Here are the best things we made all year long, in chronological order. First up are our favorite food magazine recipes, followed by a few other favorites from last year.

 

The 10 Best Food Magazine Recipes from 2014...

1. Pork and Squash Stew with Chiles 
Tender bites of pork in a savory broth with a warm, comforting heat. It's the perfect dish for winter -- and, as we wrote back in February, an ideal make-ahead dish. 

 

2. Herbed Faux-tisserie Chicken and Potatoes
We have roasted a LOT of chickens in our day. This one is absolutely one of the top three ever.

 

3. New Orleans–Style BBQ Shrimp
Spicy and buttery and delicious. The next-best thing to actually going to New Orleans.

 

4. Edamame-Miso Tuna Salad Sandwiches
This is probably the one dish we've made the most since posting about it last year. The mix of miso, hot chile oil and edamame is a great new spin on tuna salad. We've made this (especially for lunch to take to work) more times than we can count.

 

5. Ayam Jeruk (Grilled Chicken and Toasted Coconut Salad)
We debated whether to include this dish in our year-end roundup, because we'd made so many substitutions in the recipe. But who cares? This dish was to die for, and we're sure it's even better if you can find fresh galangal. And shaved coconut. And candelnuts. And Asian shallots. And Balinese long peppers...

 

6. Asian Marinated Tomatoes 
These tomatoes are really more of an accompaniment or a condiment than a stand-alone dish. But they're marvelous. If we may quote our own post from last summer: "Imagine if a bowl of salsa spent a semester abroad in Thailand, and got really into meditation and mystic Buddhism and lemongrass, and then came home and hopped up on your grilled chicken." Who doesn't want that??

 

7. Spiced Lamb Burgers
Nothing we made last year was as drool-worthy as these lamb burgers. As we said back in July, "The lamb is flavorful and full of wonderful spice from the coriander, cumin and cinnamon. The fat from the lamb melts into the pitas, soaking them with flavor and making them crispy and amazing." If you're not salivating at that, there may be something wrong with you.

 

8. Vietnamese Pork Chops with Pickled Watermelon
In August, we solidly declared this the "DISH. OF. THE. SUMMER."  We stand by that. This salty/savory/sour/sweet/pungent/crispy/juicy dish is everything you want in a grilled entree.

 

9. The Barefoot Contessa's Goat Cheese Mashed Potatoes
It's highly possible that no dish we've featured has ever elicited a greater response than these potatoes that we made for our Fakesgiving test-run of recipes. We heard from countless -- countless! -- friends and family and Bitten Word readers who made these for Thanksgiving. And just about everyone has told us these are the best mashed potatoes they've ever made.  

 

10. Maple Syrup Pie with Crème Fraîche
This delicious pie was the crowd favorite at our Fakesgiving meal this past year. We could eat it morning, noon and night. 

 

... Plus 5 More of Our Faves.

 

Thanksgiving 2014: Roasted Citrus Relish

Bon Appétit (November 2014)

Dear Bittens,

Don't make this for Thanksgiving.

Love,
Zach & Clay

 

P.S. As a standalone fruit salad, it's OK, although nothing special. But serve this instead of cranberry sauce and you will be crucified by your guests right there on the Thanksgiving table.

P.P.S. This is incredibly time-consuming and makes a paltry amount -- especially compared to how easy it is to make a more traditional cranberry sauce.

P.P.P.S.  The roasting took much longer for us before we ended up with anything remotely "golden" or "crisp." And about a third of the segments were too blackened too use. On top of that, while the roasted citrus looks kind of cool in the bowl (or does it? Does it just look like black bits floating in your relish?), we couldn't discern that it added anything in terms of flavor.

P.P.P.P.S  This relish is eye-wateringly tart. Come on, it includes raw lemons.

P.P.P.P.P.S  We ate some leftover relish on fish and it was decently good. But we had to mix in some agave to temper the overwhelmingly sour citrus.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. If you're looking for a great cran-sauce alternative, consider this Tart Apple Chutney we made in 2012. We very much liked that as a complement to turkey. But again, we think you'd want to serve that in addition to a cranberry sauce.

Thanksgiving 2014: Cherry-Port Cranberry Sauce

Cooking Light (November 2014)

We've started off our Thanksgiving coverage with a couple of raves: a Cornbread Stuffing we absolutely loved, and a Curried Carrot Soup that was a big hit with our guests.

So let's keep up that trend: This Cherry-Port Cranberry Sauce might be the best cranberry sauce we've ever made.

Summer Tomato Jam

Fine Cooking (August/September 2014)

 

When we had Margie & Co. over for dinner earlier this summer, she showed up with a whole little goodie bag of food treats: eggs and produce from her own farm, some cured meats, a couple nice cheeses, and some lovely pickles and preserves.  

One of the things she pulled out of her bag of tricks was a small jar of homemade tomato jam. "Actually," she said, "don't ever fool with tomato jam. It's not worth it. It just tastes like sugar."

Margie's cautionary words were ringing in our ears when we decided to try Fine Cooking's recipe for Summer Tomato Jam. We wanted to see for ourselves whether tomato jam would be a good way to make use of the abundant tomatoes in our area right now. So we went to the farmers market, bought a bunch of tomato "seconds" (you know, the ones that are slightly damaged or overripe) for about a buck a pound, and got to work.

 

Asian Marinated Tomatoes

Food & Wine (July 2014)

 

We like to keep our food simple in the summer: Lots of raw or simply prepared vegetables. Proteins cooked on the grill. Absolute minimal use of the oven.

But simple doesn't have to mean dull. To us, a perfect summer recipe has few ingredients, but big flavors. In Our Favorite Summer Recipes, you'll see lots of variations on this theme, like steaks served with flavorful gremolatas, or an absolutely knock-out summer pesto that we'd slather on almost anything. 

A new recipe enters the pantheon of Our Favorite Summer Recipes this week with these Asian Marinated Tomatoes.

They might not look like much, but they pack a crazy punch you won't want to miss.

Salted Herbs

Food & Wine (February 2014)

We're looking for magic in the kitchen. The dish that surprises. The condiment that elevates meat. The new pairing of flavors that just rocks our socks.

And we're hoping to find that magic in food magazines.

As we leaf through the pages of each month's new magazines, we look for things that are different. Sometimes that means they're actually unusual. Other times, it's that a dish is of the sort we've never made before. And sometimes, we're just intrigued by the small, tucked away recipe in the back of a magazine, like these Salted Herbs, which were part of the same feature as Minute Steaks with Montreal Seasoning and Herbed Anchovy Butter.  

Billed as being "great on everything from steak to chicken, fish and vegetables, as well as in soups and stews," we had high hopes for these Salted Herbs, thinking they would be excellent with our everyday takes on fish and chicken that are a staple at our house. The idea is simple: lots of herbs and vegetables chopped in a food processor, tossed with salt and stowed in the fridge. 

This recipe, though, is not for us. There's something off in the flavor of batch we made. We've used it on fish and chicken (better on the fish, offputting on the chicken), and it's so salty that you can only use it very sparingly. (And you know how much we love salt!) No, there was just some element that didn't do it for us. Maybe the spinach? Maybe the chives?  

But still, we really like the idea of herb salt, and we may give it another whirl, adding more of the herbs and less of the salt. 

Alas, no magic to be found here. At least not for us.

But we're not sweating it. More recipes await.

Thanksgiving 2013: Cabernet Cranberry-Kumquat Sauce

Bon Appétit (November 2013)

We've got a bone to pick with Bon Appétit. 

Last Thanksgiving, we were really excited about making a side dish of Hearty Greens with Kumquats. It seemed like such an interesting twist on basic greens that we were eager to try it as part of our run-up to Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, we couldn't find kumquats anywhere. We tried several grocery stores and specialty produce markets; we even looked at ordering some online. But they were nowhere to be found. Too bad, we thought. We ditched the dish.

This year, like Charlie Brown trying to kick a kumquat-flavored football, we fell for it again.

This Cabernet Cranberry-Kumquat sounded like a wonderful, unique spin on traditional cranberry sauce. We flagged it as a must-try recipe.

And then we started calling grocery stores. Same as last year: Nobody had any kumquats, and nobody knew when they'd be coming in. We called every place we could think of. (In a truly next-level display of craziness, we even called a couple produce places in New York City. Clay had a work trip to New York, and we briefly considered bootlegging some kumquats on Amtrak. But even the New York purveyors didn't have any.)

Now, in fairness, we were doing our Great Kumquat Search a few weeks prior to Thanksgiving. But most of the places we talked to said they don't usually get kumquats until January.

All of which leads us to an inescapable conclusion:

A) Bon Appétit has a time machine; or 

B) Bon Appétit has a kumquat-cloning machine; or

C) You might have to make a substitution to this recipe.

We've got some ideas for one of those. (Sadly, we're fresh out of time machines and cloning devices.)

Thanksgiving 2013: Roasted Onion and Chestnut Compote

Saveur (November 2013)

Though numerous dishes on this blog give evidence to the contrary, we are, in our day-to-day lives, healthy eaters. 

But at Thanksgiving, all bets are off, and we love a little decadence. 

If there's a time to haul out the high-fat, high-calorie ingredients, it might as well be at Thanksgiving. 

You can rub your turkey in duck fat, run through pounds upon pounds of butter, and pour on cream to your heart's content. You can even take a relatively healthy dish and make it oh-so-not-healthy. Go ahead, smother those poor green beans in bacon fat! They won't mind. 

At Thanksgiving, more is more.

That's what initially drew us to this Roasted Onion and Chestnut Compote. 

Fasten your seatbelts, Bittens. This recipe's a rich one.