The Bitten Word

Crisp Tomato, Zucchini and Eggplant Bread Gratin

Food & Wine (September 2008)

There are dishes that taste of seasons. 

Green salads mark the arrival of spring, while BBQ chicken always conjures summer in our minds.  And short ribs evoke winter in all their braised glory. For us, fall means honeycrisp apples and butternut squash, and we're terribly excited about both coming into season.

But right now we feel like we're in between seasons: The weather is cooling off, but it's still awfully warm.  Some summer vegetables are still widely available -- we even got tomatoes last week from our CSA -- and fall vegetables are just coming into season.

If pressed to identify a taste that captures this summer/fall limbo, we nominate this Crisp Tomato, Zucchini and Eggplant Gratin.

Fried Chicken Cook-Off: Thomas Keller vs. My Mom

Bon Appétit (September 2008)

Growing up, my mom owned a small business -- a florist, actually -- that demanded long hours of her. 

We spent a lot of time there as a family, with Mom and Dad filling orders, processing all the paperwork, and doing deliveries, while my brother and I did homework, helped with chores like folding bills and riding along on deliveries, taking flowers to the doors of our friends and neighbors.  (Knowing us, we likely complained as much as helped, but I'm choosing to remember that we helped more.) 

Looking back, it's a remarkable thing that my mother did, starting that business and growing it into a thriving one, moving it from a small space into a much larger, new space that my parents built, and growing a loyal and supportive clientele.  She was just about my age now when she started.  It was a lot of long hours, working holidays, unexpected funerals and no doubt many thankless tasks. 

Because of this crazy schedule, Mom wasn't the sort who cooked lavish meals every night -- and understandably so.  There were many nights that we ordered food or ate very simple dinners.  That said, Mom's a good and very competent cook.  I would imagine she would describe her own cooking style as "country," consisting of simple but hearty staples. 

But there's one dish my mother made growing up that I looked forward to every time she would make it. When I went to college, it's the thing that I would ask her to cook when I came home.  Since college, she's made it for me almost every time that I've visited them, and it never disappoints.

This dish, my friends, is fried chicken.

Herb-Crusted Salmon with Spinach Salad

Everyday Food (September 2008)

One of the first recipes we ever made from a food blog was Simply Recipes' Panko-Crusted Salmon recipe, and we've made variations on that dish many times.  If you've never made it, it's a great and easy dish of flaky salmon topped with a mixture of panko, herbs, spices and mustard. 

In our book, it's a nearly perfect salmon recipe, especially for a weeknight meal.

Can it be beat? 

Summer It's Gone: What We Cooked and What We Didn't (But Wish We Had)

It's been a busy summer here at The Bitten Word, cooking from our magazines and also incorporating vegetables from our CSA.  It was definitely the most fun we've ever had cooking during the summer. 

Taking stock of our first summer here on the blog, there are a few recipes that rise to the top in terms of our favorites, but there are also many recipes that we flagged for cooking but just didn't get to, but recommend that you give them a try.

Now on to Fall -- September and October issues of the magazines are already arriving, and there's lots we're wanting to cook. 

Let us know if you try one of our recommended recipes -- we'd love to hear how they turned out.  After all, Summer will be here again before we know it. 

Porterhouse Steak with Pan-Seared Cherry Tomatoes

Gourmet (August 2008)

When we went out to the farm for u-pick tomatoes, cherry tomatoes were also available.  These tomatoes were amazing -- sweet, addicting and delicious right off the vine.  We quickly picked a bag of them. 

Some of the tomatoes were consumed on the way home (even though it was 8 a.m.), but most were used in salads.  With so many great cherry tomatoes at our disposal, we decided to cook Gourmet's July cover recipe. 

Ripe Tomato Stack with Pine Nuts and Mozzarella

For Clay's birthday, Zach's mom gave him a copy of The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper by Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift. It's a beautiful cookbook -- filled with great dinner ideas.

One of the best features in this book is that almost every recipe includes multiple variations.  For instance, a recipe for Lemon-Garlic Roast Salmon on New Potatoes also offers the variation of Chutney Roast Fish.

Other features, like "Building a Soup," provide basic templates for recipes, teaching you to improvise with your ingredients.

Tidbits & sidebars throughout the book ("Pasta Water: The Hidden Sauce," "Sally's New Years Resolution," etc.) make reading it cover-to-cover a pleasure. 

Moroccan Chicken with Apricot-and-Olive Relish

Food & Wine (August 2008)

When we first started this blog, we thought that one of the advantages to forcing ourselves to cook from our food magazines would be that we'd end up eating dishes and flavors we never otherwise would have tried.

To some extent, that's been true. (Turkish manti and Raw Corn and Cashew Chowder come to mind, and we really liked those!)

But we've largely found ourselves cooking foods that just, well, sound delicious. Maybe it's something we wouldn't have gotten around to cooking, but it's usually something that's solidly within our taste comfort-zone.

So we wanted to cook a dish that would challenge our palates -- something with bold new flavors we'd never combined before.

This chicken with apricots and olives more than qualified.

Blueberries in Gin Syrup

Gourmet (August 2008)

On the evening when we served Grilled Herbed Poussins, our friends E & G were over, and we wanted to also serve a dessert. 

But it needed to be something quick and easy, sincethis was a weeknight meal.  We are working boys, after all.  

Blueberries in Gin Syrup was the exact thing we were looking for.

Grilled Herbed Poussins

Gourmet (July 2008)

The July 2008 issue of Gourmet has the distinction of having an actual sexy (!) photo spread, called "Rollin' on the River," by Quentin Bacon.

It's hilariously unlike anything we've seen in a food magazine to date:  six uber-attractive twenty-somethings, frolicking in swimsuits while eating some truly beautiful food.  

When's the last time you saw abs in a food mag? 

In these waning days of summer, we suggest you try these Grilled Herbed Poussins.  They may not give you abs, but they definitely won't leave you feeling guilty.

Canning Tomatoes

As we've mentioned before, we both grew up around relatives who canned vegetables every summer. Still, we'd never done it ourselves, and the thought of it seemed daunting.

But when our CSA farm recently offered unlimited U-pick tomatoes, we decided it was high time to learn.

So one day last week, we got up early and Zipcar'd out to the farm, a beautiful rural plot that's actually only about 15 miles out of D.C. 

By 8 a.m., we were standing amid the cool tomato vines, inhaling their spicy, pungent scent. As the morning fog burned off and a rooster crowed from the barn, we plucked impossibly perfect ripe orbs -- pink, red, orange and purple -- from the vines.

It was a pastoral, idyllic morning -- and it belied the frantic bloodbath waiting for us at home.