The Bitten Word

Burgers with Blue Cheese Mayo and Sherry Vidalia Onions

Cooking Light (June 2011)

Ever since we made the Umami Burgers with Port and Stilton, we've had a hankering for another hamburger. Those umami burgers were good, but they left us wanting more. 

We needed a real, honest-to-goodness, amazing burger. We're talking the kind that's packed with flavor, prepared on the grill, and piled high with delicious toppings. The kind of burger where the first bite makes makes you open your eyes wide with joy.

Well, we found it with these Burgers with Blue Cheese Mayo and Sherry Vidalia Onions.

Garden Update: Fear and a Little Bit of Loathing

An Update on Our Backyard Garden

Though we try to be fearless in the kitchen, willing to tackle just about any task or new dish, something about gardening strikes pure fear into our hearts.

In the two years that we've been trying to plant and grow vegetables, we've read a good amount of gardening books and have friends to offer solid green-thumb advice.

But there's something about the uncertainty of the garden -- "Is this plant dying?," "Are we getting enough sun? Enough water?," "Is this what I planted or a weed?" -- that is simultaneously thrilling and completely depressing.

That's not to say that things aren't going well in our garden. There's a lot to celebrate. Most excitedly, we have a bunch of tomatoes that are ripening on the vine. All of our tomatoes are small varieties, and we easily already have 30 tomatoes that have formed, with more on the way. The largest of the tomatoes are starting to get a little color, and we can't wait to start harvesting them.

Strawberry Fool

 Bon Appétit (June 2011)

Much like the "spatchcocked" turkey and the Tipsy Affogato, we were initially drawn to this Strawberry Fool based largely on the name. We've been reading about fools in food magazines for a few years now (first in Martha Stewart Living, if memory serves). A fool is an English dessert made with pureed fruit, whipped cream and sugar.

Aside from the intriguing name, this dish boasts an ingredient trio -- strawberries, cream and sugar -- that's hard to beat. Plus, in a modern spin, this take on a fool includes crumbled, crisp ladyfingers to add a bit of texture. 

Overnight Iced Coffee at Home

Picture it: Summer 2008. The first Sex and the City movie was in theaters, Michael Phelps was swimming in obscurity, and Sarah Palin was a mostly unknown governor up in Alaska.

And we fell in love with Cold Brewed Iced Coffee -- and wrote about it here on the blog.

It's a simple idea: Put coffee grounds in a jar, fill that jar with water, and then place the jar in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, you have a jar full of strong but refreshing coffee. It instantly became a staple in our house during hot summer months.  

Since then, iced coffee has definitely been the blog item we've made most often in our own home (although sometimes we wish this cake held that distinction). When it's warm outside, we're brewing at least one batch of cold coffee each night. Sometimes we brew two batches.

But in browsing that old post a few weeks ago, we realized that we no longer make our iced coffee the same way we described back then. In 2008, we were brewing the coffee in jars, and then straining it through coffee filters. It was a messy affair that too often led to a mess on our countertops. Also: double straining, as we recommended then? For the birds!

So we took the suggestions of a reader and learned how to make better iced coffee at home. And we've never looked back. 

Umami Burgers with Port and Stilton

Food & Wine (June 2011)

We were frankly a little surprised by how many readers picked the June Food & Wine cover as their favorite in our most recent gallery. It's not that it's not a lovely cover -- it certainly is! -- but it was so different compared to all the other, more summery images. 

But it was obvious that you guys were craving a burger, so we knew we had to make that cover recipe the first chance we had.

This is anything but a standard summer burger. It's not just the port and the Stilton cheese that make this burger so unique and drool-worthy. It's the inclusion of three other ingredients we bet you've never had in a burger before: dried mushrooms, seaweed and fish flakes!

Our Giveaway Winners + June's Best Food Magazine Features

Wow! So many of you entered our latest giveaway by leaving a comment on the June magazine cover gallery. There were nearly 500 comments in total!

Before we get to the winners, we wanted to highlight a few great features or articles in the June magazines. 

Cook's Illustrated has a fantastic guide to cooking greens in the centerfold of their June issue. If you have questions about how to store, clean, prep or cook any kind of greens, you have to check out this definitive guide.

We don't typically receive Cooking Light, but they offered to send us their June issue. There were quite a few recipes that we found interesting, but we were especially taken by one of the feature articles -- "Chef, Broiling" by Julianna Grimes. The piece tells the story of how South Carolina chef Shaun Garcia resolved to grow his own food for his restaurant last summer, and failed spectacularly. It's a great read and made us feel better about our considerably less serious problems in our own backyard garden. 

Saveur's BBQ Nation issue is a must-read for barbecue fanatics. The photography is fantastic and the issue covers barbecue from all over the country. The entire issue is a vegetarian's nightmare, and we mean that in the kindest way possible.

Thinking about setting up a prep station for your outdoor grilling? Then you have to read Martha Stewart Living's take on how to create "a custom prep station for better barbecuing." It even has an aluminum foil dispenser, which just about blew our minds.

Food Network Magazine typically has a little pullout book that features a bunch of the same type of recipes. This month's is 50 Condiments, and there are some really fun ideas included, from a curry ketchup to a spicy duck sauce. Scallion-Bacon Ketchup? Yes, please. 

We were also smitten with Bon Appétit's "Freeze! Right where you are..." featuring granitas, semifreddos, and ice pops. We want to eat all of them.

Fine Cooking, meanwhile, has an intriguing set of recipes about meatless grilling, which we loved since we're always look for new ways to use vegetables from our CSA. 

And lastly, lots of you commented to say how much you love that burger on Food & Wine's cover. It was by far the most popular of the June magazine covers. We hadn't planned to make that burgher, but so many of you loved the image, we decided we have to try it the recipe. That will be our next post!

So who won the giveaway?

Spicy Sriracha-Grilled Tofu

Bon Appétit (June 2011)

Tofu. 

If you're trying to de-emphasize meat in your diet, as we've tried to do this year, sooner or later you're going to find yourself eating tofu. We've actually been experimenting this spring with cooking lots of the stuff.

But here's the thing: It's usually pretty bland. 

"Yeah, yeah," you're saying. "Of course it's bland. Like potatoes or rice, tofu is an empty canvas, a culinary blank slate ready to take on whatever flavors you throw at it."

That's true, we guess. But we haven't had too much luck getting tofu to taste like much of anything. Like, say you're eating a yummy veggie tofu stir-fry. The vegetables are full of great flavors, but when you bite into a piece of tofu, it's like, "Oh, now I am eating the tofu part of this stir fry." It's not bad. You're just aware of this little bite of blandness in an otherwise flavorful dish.

Its lack of presence is just so ... present.

Anyway, forget all that. Because this Spicy Sriracha-Grilled Tofu is the hottest, spiciest thing we've eaten in ages.

June Magazine Covers Gallery + Win 1 of 10 Frying Pans!

Summer approaches, and it's definitely evident on the June covers of food magazines. There's barbecue and burgers, frozen treats and luscious summer fruit. If the food mag covers are any indication, everything this summer will be "easy," "fun" and "perfect." (Also, "secrets" will be revealed!)

We don't know about all that, but we do have one thing that's sure to get your summer off to a terrific start: A giveaway!

See, a few weeks ago, the folks at Jacob Bromwell reached out to us. It's America's oldest cookware company -- founded in 1819! They've been producing cookware the same way, with the same materials and processes, for 190 years.

For this month's gallery, they offered to send their Frontier Frying Pan to 10 Bitten Word readers. We liked the look of the pan (pictured right) -- and love that it would be ideal for indoor or outdoor use.

So how do you win one of these frying pans?

Morning Glory Muffins

Cook's Country (May/June 2011) 

 

We've been to our fair share of coffee shops. So we were already familiar with the glories of the Morning Glory Muffin before seeing them featured in the most recent Cook's Country.

If you're not familiar with them (several friends we've discussed them with over the last week haven't been), they're those beautiful, carrot-studded concoctions of fruit and nuts, typically filled with raisins, cinnamon, walnuts and pieces of carrot. They're like the breakfast equivalent of a Compost Cookie -- a little bit of everything thrown in.  

Now, we're not usually muffin people. Breakfast around our house typically consists of protein shakes or oatmeal. On weekends we'll usually make some kind of eggs or the occasional pancake or waffle. 

But the arrival of guests is a great time to break out of your breakfast tradition. So when Zach's mom visited recently, we seized on the opportunity to make muffins. 

Your Questions: Best Recipes For Beginning Cooks

  

Our latest installment of Your Questions comes from Tamara: 

I LOVE your website.  I look at it while I'm work, and drool. In all seriousness, I admire your passion for cooking and the creative recipes you attempt.  I am NOT a cook.  I guess you could say I'm "just getting started" but I have the usual problem one encounters when cooking for one, I waste the fresh ingredients and hardly use the specialty stuff I buy.  If I loved to cook and could figure out how to make use of all the random things I pick up, that would be one thing.  But I don't!  And in all honesty, I don't have the money to buy oyster sauce for one recipe.  Can you guys have a post about some simple-ingredient things to make??  I would love to try to make something flavorful but simple.  I know you have some up already, just hoped I could coax you to dedicate a post to gourmet for beginners.... Thanks for reading!!

What a great question! Both of us have (literally) been there.

Before we recommend some specific recipes, here are three pieces of general advice for getting started in the kitchen: 

1. Only buy fresh ingredients with a plan in mind. It's easy to go to the grocery or the farmers market and buy bags full of pretty things, but it's also so depressing to find that those same ingredients have died a lonely death in the crisper. Prior to going shopping, we try to think through what we want out of the next three to four meals, and we also take stock of what we already have on hand. Of course, if you're like us, impulse buys are still inevitable. But we try to limit them, and when we do go all shopaholic, we commit to exploring new recipes with the ingredients.

2. Know what's in your fridge.  We use a Vegetable Board to make sure we're not wasting produce. It works for us, helping us to focus on what we have on hand when trying to figure out what to cook, but you may find a method that works better for you.  

3. Get a cookbook that can be a go-to resource for simple recipes. We recommend Mark Bittman's excellent How to Cook Everything or Everyday Food's Great Food Fast. In fact, you may want to consider getting a subscription to Everyday Food. It was one of Clay's first food magazine subscriptions and every issue is filled with great, not overly complicated recipes. 

Here are a few recipes we've loved -- they're perfect for beginners and they require few ingredients: