The Bitten Word

Happy Holidays from The Bitten Word!

We're heading out to Tennessee for the next week, to see friends and family and generally stuff our faces with every kind of food imaginable.

We hope you have a great holiday!

Clay & Zach

Holiday Party Food: Ginger-Miso Sweet Pea Spread, Parsnip Bacon & Imperial Punch Royale; Plus, How to Make an Ice Ring

Recipes from Food & Wine and Bon Appétit

When it came time to taste our 12-Month Aged Eggnog, we invited a group of friends over for the event.  It ended up being a small gathering of about a dozen folks, including our friend Ralph's parents who were in town.

But we couldn't just serve something as boozy as the eggnog without also having some food on hand, so we used it as an excuse to make three recipes that we had tagged in recent issues. 

The first was Ginger-Miso Sweet Pea Spread (pictured above) from the December Food & Wine.

Flourless Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip Cookies

Southern Living (December 2010)

The two of us have a lot in common when it comes to food. We have similar tastes, we're both willing to eat just about anything, and we have a penchant for selecting the exact same dishes on a restaurant menu (if only that was a game show, we'd be shoe-ins!). 

In fact, the places where our palates differ are few, and mostly center around dill (Clay doesn't hate it but isn't a huge fan) and mushrooms (Zach's still trying to get on board). 

But the one thing we agree on more strongly than anything else? 

It's an undying, passionate love for the combination of chocolate and peanut butter.  Chocolate and peanut butter together is our weakness, our craving, our happy place we'd visit over and over and over again.

We've made plenty of dishes featuring this combo here on the blog.  At the bottom of this post, you can see a list of our four favorite PB-and-chocolate recipes. 

So when we got on a little cookie-making kick last week, starting with Snow-Capped Macaroons, Southern Living had our number with their recipe for Flourless Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Snow-Capped Macaroons

Food Network Magazine (December 2010)

Every December, you can count on the holiday issues of all the food magazines to be overflowing with cookie recipes.

Maybe it's us, but this year's issues seem to have even more cookies than usual, dazzling arrays of snickerdoodles, shortbreads, thumbprints, haystacks, gingerbreads, iceboxes, meringues, Linzers and on and on and on.

We're not complaining.

After all, if you're ever gonna make a cookie, now's a good time to do it!

Also, call us crafty, but "making holiday cookies" sounds a little fun, and we start to imagine a day spent making all kinds of beautiful creations that get wrapped up in little boxes and given to friends. 

Well, that's not going to happen, but we thought we'd do our part with these Snow-Capped Macaroons from Food Network magazine. We love coconut, and the notion of a classic macaroon dipped in chocolate and topped with sugar sounded too good to pass up.

Potato Gratin with Rosemary Crust

Southern Living (December 2010)

The holidays call for show-stopper dishes.

We're thinking big beef tenderloins, glorious fresh-baked breads and towering cakes: the kinds of dishes that are brought out to the dining room "with quiet pride," as Nigella would say, to be met with oohs and ahhs.

What we're not thinking when we think about show-stoppers? 

Potatoes. 

We whip them, we bake them, we smash them. Sometimes, we arrange them all funny in a pan and bake them till their crispy, which is wonderful, but still isn't quite a show-stopper.

Well, get ready to see potatoes in a whole new light, because this Potato Gratin with Rosemary Crust is one of our new favorite dishes.

Today's Live Chat

In case you missed our live chat this morning with TBD.com (a local news and community site here in DC), you can still read the whole conversation on their site!

We managed to work in mentions of our favorite recipes, our all-time flops and the importance of jazz hands in the kitchen.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the chat and asked questions.  It was a lot of fun!

 

 

Taste Test: Twelve-Month Aged Eggnog

Ladies and gentlemen: It's eggnog time.

We wrote about it in January; we teased about it last week.

Finally, this weekend, we popped open the eggnog that had been sitting in our fridge for nearly a year.

Raw eggs, dairy, sugar, booze. No cooking. No heating. Just mix together, stash in the refrigerator for a year, open and drink.

So how'd it taste? To capture our initial reactions, we decided to tape ourselves sampling the nog.

Check out the taste test!

After the jump, some more thoughts on the nog, along with the recipe!

Holiday Gift Ideas for the Food Fanatic

 

At this point, you're likely either frantically searching for gift ideas or you've already wrapped it up and are just shopping for yourself.

Regardless, we've been poring over a stack of books recently, some of which we think would make great gifts this holiday season.

So here's The Bitten Word's 2010 holiday gift guide!  It's pretty book-heavy, but we've got some non-book ideas as well.

 

For the Cook Who Wants to Learn Some New Tricks

Earlier this year, we wrote about Dorie Greenspan's latest book, Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours. We first gave the book to Zach's mom for her birthday, and then after thumbing through that copy prior to wrapping it, we decided to buy a copy for ourselves.

This a beautiful book and there isn't a single thing that we wouldn't make. In fact, when we're home in Tennessee for the holidays, we hope to cook some dishes from the book with Zach's mom.

Since we purchased this cookbook, Clay had a chance to meet Dorie when she was in town promoting it.  She was phenomenal, and so is this book!

See a photo of Clay & Dorie below, plus check out our other recommendations! 

Beet and Tangerine Salad with Cranberry Dressing

Bon Appétit (December 2010)

 

Before we get to this recipe, a note: 

You may or may not be aware, but in his day job, Clay works for Share Our Strength, a non-profit focused on ending childhood hunger in America.  He started there this last summer and loves the job and the mission of the organization.  At Share Our Strength, Clay is the Online Community Director, and as part of that role, he's helped organize a holiday blogger fundraiser called Share Our Holiday Table.  

Share Our Holiday Table is a progressive, seven-course, online dinner party, where more than 70 bloggers are dedicating their posts in order to raise awareness of the issue of child hunger as well as funds to fight the problem. As part of today's course -- Salads -- we're dedicating this post to Share Our Holiday Table. During this holiday season, we hope you'll consider making a donation to the fight against childhood hunger.

And now on to our regularly scheduled program....

It's hard to get excited about a winter salad.

Sure, they're often filled with roasted goodness or sometimes great citrus, but on the whole we seldom ooh and ahh over any winter salad. They just don't hold the same promise as a spring and summer salad, tossed together with fresh veggies and the season's best greens. Staring into the bottom of our crisper in early December, those lovely greens from our CSA seem so, so far away. 

We are, however, beet fanatics. And as soon as we saw this recipe in Bon Appétit, we knew it would make an appearance on our table this month. Though we seldom make one at home, we often order beet and citrus salads in restaurants and love the combination.  

Twelve-Month Aged Eggnog: It's Almost Time!

Remember way back in January, when we mixed up some eggnog and set it in the fridge to age?

After a year of sacrificing valuable refrigerator space for these two bottles, it's nearly time to crack it open and have a taste!

We're having some folks over this weekend to try it (don't worry -- we'll have medics on-hand).  And we'll report back with everyone's reactions early next week.

Stay tuned!