The Bitten Word

Your Questions: Crowd-Pleasers for a Weekend at the Beach

It's time for another edition of Your Questions, in which we attempt to answer readers' queries about recipe ideas, kitchen gadgets and whether Carrie should leave Big for Aiden in Abu Dhabi. As always, if you've got a question for us, email us! 

This week's question comes from Julia in Washington, D.C. -- and it's got us all kinds of excited to ring in the summer cooking season!

Hey Clay and Zach, 

I'll be with 16 of my friend's guy friends and their friends and girlfriends for memorial day weekend - do you have any quick, easy, cheap recipes that would be good for on and/or off the beach (and that can be doubled/tripled/etc as necessary)?!?  I'm hoping to make a good impression on these people and figured I'd go straight to the experts.  Thanks so much for your help!

Cheers, 

Julia

Good question, Julia! 

We've been traveling for the past two weekends -- first to West Virginia and then to Memphis for a wedding -- so we're sad to report that The Bitten Word will be beachless this Memorial Day. We do, however, how some ideas for fun, beach food. Hope you have a great time, and do let us know what you make!

And now, here are our picks for great beach crowd-pleasers.

The Bitten Word: We're In a Cookbook!

Hey look -- we're in a cookbook! 

We're extremely excited to announce that we're featured in a new cookbook, 55 Knives. Edited by our buddy Nick at Macheesmo, it's a collection of essays and recipes from 55 food bloggers -- including us! The book contains more than 170 pages of short food stories and all kinds of great recipes.

And since it's an ebook, once you download it, it's saved on your computer for you to use whenever you want.  And that also means it's completely linkable and searchable -- you can find specific recipes (or even ingredients) quickly and easily. It's also a terrific way to get introduced to some food blogs that you may not be familiar with.

We're really grateful to Nick for creating this and putting it all together. And we're extremely proud to be included!  The book costs $19 -- but if you buy it before June 1, it's $14.

If you're interested, you can order 55 Knives through The Bitten Word (ordering it through our blog means part of that sale goes to us...which is, you know, nice for us).

Oh, and what's our contribution to the book?  It's a recipe we created for individual mini-Beef Wellingtons!  If you're a regular reader, you know that making Beef Wellingtons was one of our Culinary Resolutions for 2009, and was also discussed as part of our 2010 Resolutions. 

Anyhow, if you're interested, check out the book. And if you do, let us know what you think! 

Grilled-Chicken Tacos and Chile-Spiced Skirt Steak Tacos

Food & Wine (May 2010)

In its latest issue, Food & Wine declares tacos to be the current "it" item on hip menus. "First it was burgers," the mag says. "Then pizza. Now, American chefs are obsessed with tacos."

Count us in! We love tacos, and their seemingly limitless reinventions and twists make them an endlessly fun food. F&W highlights several tacos from different restaurants and food trucks around the country (forgive us, but we weren't brave enough to try our hands at the haute white-trash L.A. Gas Station Tacos, based on Los Angeles' Kogi BBQ truck, which feature bean dip, ham, pork rinds, American cheese, beef jerky and an apple!)

Instead, we opted for a couple of the feature's more traditional tacos, the Grilled-Chicken Tacos from NYC's Dos Toros Taqueria, and the Chile-Spiced Skirt Steak Tacos from Calexico in Brooklyn.

We had a great time preparing these, and they were a fun dinner to serve when we had a couple friends over recently.

Unfortunately, the results weren't as great as we'd hoped.

Fast Strawberry Scones

Everyday Food (May 2010)

Being able to whip up a batch of perfect, last-minute scones on a whim seems, to us, as indispensable as having a go-to roast chicken recipe, knowing how to fix a proper martini or having a stellar vinaigrette recipe at your fingertips. It's the kind of thing we'd like to have in our proverbial back pockets, for when guests are visiting for the weekend or we find ourselves throwing a last minute brunch.

Well, we are sad to report that we are cooks without a favorite scone recipe. In fact, we think we've only made scones once before, years ago, and can't recall the flavor or the recipe source. We do, however, consume our fare share of scones. Nearly every week we buy one to split from Atwater's bakery while we tour the farmers market. Call it a pre-breakfast amuse bouche. 

So now begins our search for our favorite, go-to scone recipe, starting with this one from Everyday Food.

West Virginia Weekend: The Bacon Explosion

Our friends Scott and Charlie invited us to join them and some other friends at their cabin in West Virginia this past weekend. We jumped at the chance to head to the country, unplug and spend a few days with friends.

Little did we know that a culinary adventure also awaited us in wild, wonderful West Virginia.

You see, our friend Charlie had a dream--a dream of hope, of peace and of multiple types of cured pork products.

His dream? To make the Bacon Explosion.

You may have read about the Bacon Explosion, invented by BBQAddicts.com. It's been lauded as "the BBQ Sausage Recipe of All Recipes" and has been much discussed online. The recipe was even featured in the New York Times earlier this year. 

It's not for the faint of heart. (If you don't believe us, just check out the "bacon weave" in Step 1.)  And, oddly, it's one of those rare recipes that actually appears less and less appetizing the closer it gets to being done.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.  Come join us, won't you, on a voyage to pork nirvana.

Grilled Chicken With White Barbecue Sauce

Southern Living (May 2010)

In Zach's small hometown of Tullahoma, TN, there's a deli called Daddy Billy's. Originally opened as a grocery store in 1893, the spot eventually evolved into a take-away sandwich shop. Today, it's more of a restaurant and bar, with live music on the weekends and cold beer in the courtyard out back. But you can still get a great sandwich there.

Several years ago, some friends of Zach's family purchased Daddy Billy's and started catering private events in addition to running the place. They began serving something that quickly became a signature item: white barbecue sauce.

We'd love to say the white barbecue sauce was a re-discovered recipe from the original grocery store, a relic from a dusty old recipe card found tucked away in a desk. But the fact is that the provenance of white barbecue sauce is well known. It was invented (or at least popularized) by Big Bob Gibson BBQ in Decatur, AL.

Regardless of its origins, there's a reason a white barbecue sauce could easily become a signature menu item. It's absolutely delicious -- cool, peppery, tangy and a whole new taste for your grill.

Meyer Lemon Ginger Marmalade

For much of April, we were obsessed with the thought of making the wonderfully elegant-looking Meyer Lemon Crepe Cake on the cover of Martha Stewart Living. We initially thought that we'd make it for an Easter Brunch, but because we were training a 10-mile race the following weekend, a huge holiday brunch seemed like a bad idea.

And after that, we really just couldn't come up with a reason to make the crepe cake. After all, that cake isn't a mid-week, just-throw-it-all-together kind of affair. It looks like the kind of cake you'd serve following an entrée of crustless cucumber sandwiches. In anticipation of making the cake, however, we had already bought a big bag of Meyer lemons. 

Meyer lemons were something we'd actually never purchased before. If you're not familiar, a Meyer is a variety of lemon that is thought to be a cross between a lemon and an orange. They have a yellow-orange color and aren't quite as tart as regular lemons. 

There we were, crepe cake-less and with lemons that were quickly approaching their prime.

So, what to do when life hands you Meyer lemons?

Make marmalade!

Warm Potato Salad with Goat Cheese

Martha Stewart Living (April 2010)

 

On lists of summer side dishes, potato salads inevitably rise to the top, duking it out with coleslaw for the title of Favorite Summer Side. 

While we're definitely onboard for coleslaws, experimenting with interesting takes on the dish, potato salads have always been a little less exciting to us. 

Perhaps we're traumatized by the mayonnaise-laden potato salads of our Southern youths, where it seemed as if the cook was asking, "Would you like a little potato with your mayonnaise? Oh sorry, I mean your Miracle Whip?" 

Or perhaps it's just that we don't like mayonnaise that much. We hardly use it in our kitchen and it seems as if every time we need it for a recipe, the neglected jar in the fridge has expired, causing us to run to the store mid-cooking for a new jar. (Please don't tell our sweet Southern grandparents, but we've become mustard folk.)

So for us, the potato salad is in need of a makeover.  And that's just what Martha Stewart Living provides.

Tipsy Affogato

Everyday Food (May 2010)

Surely you're familiar with the drag queen name-game, right? You know, the one where you take the name of your first pet, coupled with the first street you lived on, and that's the name you'd adopt as your fabulous drag-queen persona?

Zach has always thought this particular method yielded a great drag name for him: "Suki Westwood." Clay's, on the other hand, is a little less ideal: "Treasure Route #1."  (Although that's still better than our friend Whitney's would-be drag name: "Reggie Old Medina Hwy.")

Well, apologies to the drag queen name-game, but we've decided on a new moniker, should the mood ever strike us to paint on some makeup and slap on a wig: "Tipsy Affogato."

Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Tipsy Affogato! 

It's got a nice ring to it, yes?

Okay, okay. We're not going to do drag anytime soon. (Trust us, we would make for some ugly ladies.) Instead, we'll continue to make this dessert, which has instantly become one of our all-time favorites.

Spring Shells and Cheese

Food Network Magazine (April 2010)

We frequently start our posts off talking about a particular ingredient, or what drew us to a certain food magazine recipe, or why we wanted to try a given dish.

But today, if you'll forgive us, we're going to skip the smalltalk.

You. Need. To. Make. This. Dish. 

And you need to make it tonight.