The Bitten Word

Chicken Chili

Martha Stewart Living (October 2010)

We'll end October with what is likely our favorite recipe from this month's crop of food magazines.

But first, a side note.  Earlier this week we wrote about Fine Cooking's excellent recipe for Classic Buttermilk Cornbread that so excellently walked the Mason-Dixon line. When we made that recipe, we really had no intention of writing about it. In fact, we didn't even make it to eat it as cornbread. Instead, we made it as a topping for this Chicken Chili.  But after one taste of the cornbread, we knew we had to share it with you. It was that good.

We get a lot of questions from friends and people we meet about how and why we select certain recipes.  Is it a random selection?  Is there a  process? Enough people ask, so maybe you're curious too. So here's what we do.

The food magazines for an upcoming month generally start arriving in the middle of the previous month. At least that's the case for most of the magazines.  Cook's Illustrated arrives the earliest, while Saveur  comes last, arriving closer to the actual start of each month.

As each month's food magazines roll into our mailbox, we spend time going through each one, and we make 'the list,'  which is kept in a little black book that we keep.  Some people's little black books are filled with phone numbers, ours just happens to be filled with recipes.

So Zach selects dishes, Clay selects dishes and the list is made. We'll typically select many more items than we actually end up having time to make, even if we were cooking every day. With some magazines, we end up with an entire page full of recipes we'd like to try; others, just a handful. We select recipes that we think sound good, but we also try to select recipes that are outside our cooking comfort zone. Maybe they're a new spin on a dish, or something really outlandish that we think will just be really fun (we're looking at you, Deep Fried Bacon and Eggs). 

And from there, we just start cooking. Some dishes are selected for nights we know we'll be eating in. Other times, we invite friends over for dinner and cook multiple dishes from the list. A curse of eating at our house is that we rarely make the same dish twice (though there are recurring exceptions). 

So some dishes get cooked. Others linger on the list and get left behind. And now November beckons, leaving October's orphans left behind.

So back to the cornbread. Funny enough, it wasn't on the list, which in most months would mean that it wouldn't get made. But this chili was on the list (a Zach selection), and we loved how Martha Stewart Living styled the dish, with big cubes of cornbread croutons. We wanted to make the chili and happened to remember that the October/November Fine Cooking had a cornbread feature, so we went back, pulled out the magazine and went to making the cornbread.

That's one very long introduction to what is the larger point of this post:

This chicken chili is well worth your time.

Our Wedding

As you may or may not know, we got married last month. Many of you wrote to wish us well, and we can't tell you how much that means!  Thank you!

Since then, several of you have asked us to share more details about the event, so we're dedicating this post to just that. We haven't yet gotten our photos back from the photographer we hired, but our friend William Waybourn, along with a few others, took some amazing photos, so we thought we'd share them with you.

(And who knows? Maybe we'll even do another post when we do get the rest of the photos!)

Classic Buttermilk Cornbread

Fine Cooking (October/November 2010)

Like all good Southern boys, we both grew up eating a lot of buttermilk cornbread. It's classic Dixie fare, and you'll find it on the dinner table all year long. (Or the dessert table: To this day, Zach's grandfather's favorite after-dinner treat is a half-glass of buttermilk with cornbread crumbled into it, topped with a spoonful of sorghum. To each his own.)

But what's not to love? Moist, golden, Southern-style cornbread hot out of the iron skillet -- with that distinct buttermilk tang -- topped with a little sweetcream butter?  It's perfect!

One point of clarification before we continue, though: This ain't Southern cornbread.

Swedish Pancakes

Cook's Country (October 2010)

You know how, whenever you go to IKEA, there's always one thing that you get home with and think, "Hunh. Wait, why did we buy this, again?" And then it sits at your house for two years until you either throw it away or find some use for it.

Maybe it's a 100-pack of votive candles. Or an amorphous orange ceramic serving dish. Or, hey, maybe even a bookcase.

In our case, it was lingonberry jam.

We bought it earlier this year with the good intentions of throwing an Austrian-themed dinner inspired by a January 2010 Bon Appétit feature. Honestly, we just never got around to doing it. (In some alternate universe, we held that dinner party and become huge fans of Liptauer. And we're probably wearing lederhosen.)

Anyway, there was the lingonberry jam, staring us in the face every time we opened the pantry, taunting us.

Finally, we decided to do something about it. So we made these Swedish Pancakes.

Mashed Carrots with Honey and Chili Powder

Everyday Food (October 2010)

Left to our own devices, we easily turn to the same cast of side-dish characters when it comes to our weeknight cooking.

 

There are the frozen sweet peas, which we adore but served so often last winter that we've barely had them since. And then there's everything that falls into the category of roasted vegetables, which we do constantly, be it squash, turnips, sweet potatoes, or even something like radishes.  There's a lot of variety here but the base preparation is always the same:  Toss with oil, salt and pepper, and roast until nicely caramelized.

So we're always on the lookout for easy side dishes that can mix up our menus, especially when it comes to weeknight cooking. 

Acorn Squash with Rosemary and Brown Sugar

Fine Cooking (September 2010)

In our book, there's really nothing that says "autumn" more that acorn squash. It's sweet and earthy and, we think, more flavorful than pumpkin.

When we cook with acorn squash, we keep things super simple: Split 'em across the middle, scoop out the seeds, shave off the top and bottom so the two halves can sit upright. Then slather each half with a little salt, add a pat of butter and a glug of maple syrup, and bake for about 45 minutes at 350 degrees.

It's beyond easy, and it takes about 3 minutes of active time in the kitchen. And the taste is warm and wonderful on a dark autumn evening.

So we were eager to try this Acorn Squash with Rosemary and Brown Sugar. With white wine, rosemary, lemon and brown sugar, it sounded like somebody took our standard, go-to recipe and turned up the volume.

Unfortunately, we should have kept the volume right where it was.

Lamb Ragout with Olives and Peppers

Food & Wine (October 2010)

"YES! Fall!"

That was the reaction of our friend Drew when we set this dish on the table during a recent dinner party.

It's the perfect reaction and we could agree more.

This hearty lamb stew, slowly braised and given a great Mediterranean spin from olives and red peppers, is everything that's perfect about fall cooking: leisurely, warm and satisfying.

Chocolate-Malt Cake

Bon Appétit (September 2010)

Last Christmas, we made a Hot Chocolate Layer Cake with Homemade Marshmallows. With its layers of chocolate cake and icing topped by a springy white halo of marshmallows, we called it "flirty and fun," "light-hearted" and "whimsical."

Now imagine that whimsical, sweet, fun little cake all grown up and in high school, ditching class to smoke in the parking lot, making out under the bleachers, and stealing its parents' car for joyrides to the lake.

In other words, this Chocolate-Malt Cake is dangerously -- deliciously -- bad.

With molasses, burnt marshmallows and dark malt flavor at every turn, this cake is everything that whimsical, innocent little cake wasn't.

This cake? It's downright nasty.

Two Novices Walk Into a Garden...

So it turns out you can actually drop seeds in the ground and they turn into plants.

For reals!

We planted our first garden this year, and all summer it was a constant source of amazement for both of us. 

In previous years, we've grown herbs in window boxes at the front of our house. We love having these herbs on hand through the spring, summer and fall. We've typically grown thyme, rosemary, mint and basil, but this year our sage also came back (the plant is huge!), along with our tarragon. And we received some chive seedlings from our CSA that we planted as well.  It's a happy little herb family, at least when they're not being terrorized by neighborhood squirrels. 

But this year we decided to step it up a bit and plant an actual garden.

We have a small backyard that we share with our neighbors. There's a patio with a table and chairs and room for a grill. And our compost bin is hidden back there under a tree.  Much of the ground is covered with evergreen groundcover that comes back year after year, but in the back of the yard there's a patch that we had for several years considered turning into a garden. It gets decent sun and is out of the way since it's against a fence. 

So here's a chronicle of our first stab at gardening. It begins one Saturday in early May, when we borrowed some yard tools and got to digging.

Pan-Roasted Sunchokes

A Bitten Word Recipe 

We mentioned again recently how fun it can be to cook with ingredients you've never tried before, like sweet potato greens.

Well, here's something else you might not be familiar with: sunchokes.

You may know them as "Jerusalem artichokes," but that name is falling out of favor, mostly because, well, they're neither from Jerusalem nor are they artichokes.

If you've never tried sunchokes, we're going to have you salivating by the end of this paragraph. They're one of our favorite "new" vegetables, and we absolutely love them for fall. They taste something like a cross between a potato and a rutebega, only richer, nuttier and sweeter. Pan-roasted with a little bit of butter and oil? Heaven.