The Bitten Word

Photos From Summer: County Fairs, Nashville Hot Chicken, and Questionable Facial Hair

 

Hello, Bittens!

We're off to the beach for a few days to unplug, drink some of these, and tear through a major stack of books we're hauling with us. Before we go, we wanted to share a selection of photos and stories from this summer. 

Thank you for spending time with us this summer, for your comments, your encouragement and your general awesomeness. 

Enjoy the photos below, and we'll see you in a week!

-- Clay and Zach 

 

 

This photo and the one at the top of this post are from the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair in Maryland. We went on a whim with five other friends one Saturday night. We rode carnival rides, checked out some livestock, and ate our weight in fried foods. Prepare yourself for some fried intensity. 

Skillet Corn, Edamame, and Tomatoes with Basil Oil

Martha Stewart Living (August 2012)

Martha had us at basil oil.

We're honestly not sure we would have made this if it had been called "Skillet Corn, Edamame, and Tomatoes with Basil," just because it sounds like a dish we've already made a hundred times. But add "basil oil" to the title, and we were totally on board. 

Essentially, this is a succotash, even though it's not called that. And Lord knows we love a succotash. (Would a succotash by any other name still taste as amazing? YES.)

But the basil oil intrigued us. We almost always throw a handful of chopped basil into a corn succotash -- the flavors are perfect together. But the idea of infusing oil with basil, and then using that as a dressing, made us really eager to try this dish.

Well, we did have one big takeaway from this recipe. But it wasn't the basil oil.

August Garden Update: Just One Tomato

An Update on Our Backyard Garden

We've harvested exactly one full-size tomato so far this year. 

That's right: one. 

The loneliest number. 

And really, we're fine with that. 

Seriously. 

No really.

Save us your pity.

We've been happily drowning in tomatoes, eating our fill, and making tons of sauce. Granted, those tomatoes aren't from our garden, but still.

You see, we're perfectly happy with how things have gone in our garden this summer. 

Beef-and-Watermelon Stir-fry

Southern Living (August 2012) 

Cooking with watermelon is a new idea for us. We're obsessed with it raw, or in a salad, or in a cocktail. But in a stir-fry? When we spied the beautiful photo of this dish in the most recent Southern Living, we were instantly a bit dubious. Would the watermelon hold up against the beef, snow peas and other more traditional stir-fry components? Would the flavors work?

We had to try it for ourselves. 

What We're Reading: Waning Summer Edition

When we're not reading food magazines or trying to get through our New Yorker subscription, we each usually have a book or three that we're reading. This summer we've read a few books that we really enjoyed, and we thought that you might enjoy too. 

Plus, we want your book recommendations! In a week, we're heading to the beach for Labor Day. And we're furiously planning what we're going to read while we're there. The last time we did a post like this, you all shared a number of books that we later loved. So here we go again! 

More Adventures in Tomato Canning

As we mentioned a couple weeks ago, we're in the middle of full-on canning season. About 10 days ago, our CSA added tomatoes to its unlimited U-pick list. And that was all we needed: We reserved a Zipcar for the next morning, and by 6 a.m. last Friday, we were standing in the middle of rows and rows of fragrant tomato plants.

You guys know the drill with canning tomatoes, and hopefully you've seen the (epic!) film. But we wanted to share some snapshots from our 2012 tomato-canning experience. It covered the better part of the weekend. (Thanks to a carbon monoxide alarm scare, we had to abort the process midway through and clear out while we waited for a technician to come check out the stove. It turned out to be a false alarm, which is what we'd figured. But when two different carbon monoxide detectors in your house start emitting warnings, well, you pay attention.)

Anyway, enjoy all the action of our 2012 tomato-canning adventure. Come for the bloodbath!  Stay for the 29 quarts of successfully canned tomatoes!

Smashed Okra

A Bitten Word Recipe

We just returned from four days in Tennessee, visiting Zach's family. We had a great time! We rented kayaks and spent a lazy day on a (very mild) river. We toured the George Dickel whisky distillery in Zach's hometown and had a lot of great down-time just catching up with family.

And because we were with Zach's mom, who is an excellent cook, we did a fair amount of cooking and eating at home. She'd picked up a bunch of okra at the vegetable stand where she buys her produce, so we decided to make one of her favorite preparations of the vegetable: Smashed Okra. 

Your Questions: Why Feature a Bad Recipe?

When we shared our post about State Fair Ham Loaf a few weeks ago, we received this very good question from a reader named Mindy:

Guys - I love your site! But why go to the trouble of devoting a column to "eww, this is nasty, but here's the recipe" when there are so many wonderful recipes out there yet to be discovered?  

That, Mindy, is an excellent question.

Chinese-Style Eggplant

Adapted from The Yangshuo Cooking School

We're awash in eggplant right now. 

Our CSA is having a bumper crop of eggplant. In a given week, we can easily receive three to seven pounds of eggplant. In a household of two, that's a lot of aubergine. (If you're unfamiliar with CSAs, we have a post that explains what a CSA is and how it select one.)

But we were eager for eggplant season to start this year. And we were ready. We have old standby dishes like this Eggplant Parmesan recipe (we've already made it once this month). And earlier this year we found another eggplant recipe that we loved, with these Soba Noodles with Eggplant and Mango (and it's on the docket to make again). 

But we were especially excited for eggplant season because we've been waiting to use this recipe we learned back in November when we were traveling in China. During a visit to Yangshuo, near Guilin in Guangxi Province in the Southern part of the country, we spent most of one day in a cooking class. We made five great dishes, but this eggplant was a standout.  

Tastebuds on the Move

Bittens, our tastes are changing. 

Perhaps it's because we're just being fearless eaters (or -- gulp -- because we're getting older), but we've noticed lately that we're beginning to love some tastes we previously disliked, and becoming more tolerant of others. 

And we're not talking about childhood food phobias of the "I refuse to try that" variety. We each had plenty of those. Clay had never tasted a fresh tomato until he went to college; Zach had a major aversion to creamy products like sour cream and mayonnaise. Both of these things have long fallen by the wayside as we've grown up and become more adventurous eaters.