The Bitten Word

Happy Holidays from The Bitten Word!

Hello!  We hope you're enjoying a holiday season full of good people and fantastic food. Thanks for sharing 2011 with us -- we're so excited about culinary adventures for 2012!

This is the Christmas card we sent out this year. Hope you have a wonderful New Year, and we'll be back with plenty of new posts in January.

Happy Holidays!

 

 

Gingersnap Cocktail from Momofuku Ko

A Bitten Word Adaptation

About a year ago, we had an incredible dinner at Momofuku Ko in New York City, an amazing restaurant from the chef David Chang. The food is awesome: A fixed-price tasting menu that changes every night. Our 12-course dinner had everything from Gruyere Soup with Bone Marrow and Brioche Toast, to Mackerel and Yuzu in Orange Oil, to Slow-Roasted Duck with Mustard Greens and Honey-Braised Turnips Rolled in Pumpernickel Crumbs. 

Along with all the outrageously delicious and unique food, one of the most memorable things about the dinner was the drink pairing. Restaurants that do a tasting menu almost always offer a wine pairing to go along with the food -- a procession of glasses of wine specially selected to complement each dish. 

But at Momofuku Ko, the drink pairing is much more free-wheeling. It includes wine, beer, sake and cocktails! Their thinking is that wine isn't necessarily always the best possible pairing.

We loved the idea! And we especially loved this Gingersnap Cocktail.

24 Giveaway Winners + Thoughts on Paring Down Our Cookbook Collection

Our cookbook situation has gotten a bit out of control. 

It's not so much that we're buying a lot of cookbooks. In truth, we've purchased only a handful of cookbooks this past year. When a new cookbook comes out that we really want to read, we first test drive it from the library before deciding whether to buy. Sometimes people send us books that they want to promote (which is a nice perk of writing this blog). If we love the book, we're eager to tell you about it. If not, we don't. But that still means that quite a few books come our way that we either give away or add to our shelves.

So we end up with a lot of books. We actually had to buy an additional bookcase earlier this year! But by November it was already full. And we just don't have enough space in our apartment to add more bookcases. So as the year winds down and we start to look at our food resolutions and evaluate how we're doing, it's obvious that we need to get rid of some books. 

As we've looked at our cookbook collection and tried to decide what to keep and what to purge, we've probably kept too many. (In a future post, we'll share which books we still have on our shelves). But we found 24 books that we're going to go ahead and giveaway today. So 24 readers will get a cookbook! 

But don't think you're just getting our cast-offs. For the most part, these are books we've read that we really enjoyed! We simply don't have space for all of them. So our self-imposed clean-out is your gain.  

And the randomly selected winners from the comments on our December magazines gallery are....

Clementine Granita

Martha Stewart Living (December 2011)

When we moved into our first apartment together and started cooking in earnest, granita quickly became our go-to, fall-back dessert.

Why? Because it's tasty and impressive -- and unimaginably easy.

If we had friends coming over but didn't have the time or moxie to make an elaborate dessert, we'd throw together some juice, water and sugar, pour it into a glass dish, and freeze it. Then we'd scrape it with a fork and pile it high in an old-school champagne glass, kind of like we did when we made Coffee Granita last year. We loved it and so did guests. (And in truth, a few times we served granita as a dessert before a more substantial dessert.)

These days, we don't make granita nearly as often, mostly because we've either already served it to just about everyone we know or we're trying out a new dessert to share with you. But we still love it, which is why we jumped at the chance to make this Clementine Granita from Martha Stewart Living.

December Covers Gallery + Win One of a Dozen Cookbooks

Way back in January, as part of our annual food resolutions, we resolved to "Familiarize ourselves with our cookbook collection (or purge them!)"

You, dear reader, are the beneficiary of that resolution. 

As part of this month's food magazine covers gallery, we're giving away more than a dozen cookbooks. There's Ruhlman's Twenty, The Bonne Femme Cookbook, and The Best of America's Test Kitchen 2011. There are books about Sunday Roasts, party food (Peter Callahan's Bite by Bite) and even Scanwiches. By the time we finish cleaning out the shelves, there may even be more than dozen books. 

So it's a bit of a grab bag -- and we hope you grab! 

 

Chicken Tinga Tacos

Food & Wine (December 2011)

When we're away from home, we miss having a kitchen.

Eating in restaurants every day, three meals a day, for nearly two weeks afforded us a lot of opportunities to try many great dishes in China. But every now and then it's nice to be able to just pour yourself a glass of juice or a bowl of cereal. So at the end of our trip, it wasn't that we were tired of eating Asian food as much as we were eager to cook for ourselves again.

So within days of getting back home, we were tearing through the December food magazines, plotting and planning these last couple weeks before Christmas. 

And the first thing we decided on, in this season of cookies and cakes and roasts and party food was, oddly enough, tacos.  

The Wackiest Food We Encountered in China

We like to think of ourselves as adventurous eaters who'll try just about anything.

That was, until we went to China.

During our trip to Shanghai, Beijing and Yangshuo a couple weeks ago, we encountered a number of wild food items. We were thrilled to see them -- and just as happy to let them go uneaten. Initially, we worried that maybe we were being a bit un-adventurous in not trying these foods. But then we realized we were on vacation, not Fear Factor.

We think you'll see what we mean.

Our Seven Favorite Things We Ate in China

We've been back from China for five days now, and it seems that everyone we've talked to since we got home has asked the same two questions, in the same order: Did you have a good time? and What did you eat?!

To answer the first question, yes, we had an amazing two weeks! You might be wondering: why China? Well, we have friends stationed in the Foreign Service who have been in Shanghai for nearly two years now. That entire time we've been saying that we'll visit. And since their time in Asia is nearly up, we decided this fall that it was now or never, and plotted a Thanksgiving trip with plans to visit two major cities -- Shanghai and Beijing -- and then flee to the mountains of the South, to a place called Yangshuo. 

We had some awesome adventures, and we saw some crazy interesting stuff. (Wanna know three things that are totally hot in China right now? Eyeglasses without lenses, corn on the cob on a stick, and Angry Birds paraphernalia. Seriously. These three items were everywhere we went in the country.) 

So what about the food?

For the most part, we loved it! Which is why we want to share with you our favorite meals of the two weeks away. We think these dishes give a good overview of the kinds of food we encountered through the lens of three distinct regional cuisines. The breadth of food we saw and experienced is far greater than these dishes -- just wait for our roundup of the more off-beat food we encountered -- but they were definitely our favorites.

Spoiler alert: there is no General Tso's on this list. We will say, though, that on the whole the Chinese food that we encountered was very reminiscent of American Chinese. There was definitely less fried meat, like the General, sesame chicken, and the like. But eating food in China, you can definitely and easily see how American Chinese food got to where it is today. 

We'll start with something definitely unique, the first dinner we had in Shanghai.

1. Uyghur Food

Our friends took us to a Uyghur restaurant on the first night of our trip. Uyghurs (pronounced "WEE-gurs") are Muslim Chinese, an ethnic group with Turkish ancestry. Their culture -- and cuisine -- may not be what you immediately think of as Chinese. Geographically, they're closer to Baghdad than Beijing.

The Uyghur restaurant we went to reminded us a lot of Middle Eastern restaurants we've visited here in the U.S., with tapestries and Islamic flourishes in the decor. There was lots of lamb and lots of cumin, and the dishes that were more traditionally Chinese (like dumplings) incorporated Middle Eastern flavors. There were potatoes in a thin meat sauce, folded buns with grilled lamb and vegetables (pictured above), and a steamed cabbage. To accompany it, we had a traditional Uyghur "black beer," which we thought tasted similar to a cross between a dark beer and a cola.

We loved this meal because it defied our expectations of Chinese cuisine. It was unlike any Chinese we had ever eaten, and really demonstrated that just like cuisine at home, the food in China has its own distinct and regional variations. Also, the menu offered an entire deep fried lamb -- served, you know, whole -- which we thought was a wonderfully crazy idea for a dish. 

Nigella's Chocolate Fruit Cake

We're back from China!

We just arrived home yesterday, and once we're fully unpacked and have downloaded all our photos, we'll share some tales with you. Needless to say, it was a wonderful and adventurous few weeks away. Now we're both eager to get back into the kitchen and take a break from our endless parade of noodles and dumplings and rice. 

It seems that the Christmas season exploded while we were gone. Greeting us at the airport were sparkly trees, big faux packages and holiday songs on the loudspeaker. The houses up and down our block are already done up in strings of lights and festive wreaths. 

So, mere hours back from our trip, we already have holiday cooking on the mind. And for us, holiday cooking involves one recipe that we're eager to return to each year: Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Fruit Cake.