The Bitten Word

Pressure Cooker Beef Short Ribs

Everyday Food (September 2012)

Here's something you probably don't know about us: We love a good infomercial. 

There's just something about the rhythm of them, the constant repetition of how amazing the product is. And we love all the tropes: the skeptical husband, the professor/doctor/inventor who gets hauled out to talk about the "science" behind the hype, the black-and-white shaky-cam "there-must-be-a-better-way" clips. There's just something so hypnotic and pleasant about them. (Seriously, when we think about the hours of our lives spent watching the same Magic Bullet infomercial...)

Anyway, an infomercial based on this short rib recipe would start off something like this:

Do you love short ribs but hate how long they take to cook? All that searing and braising and waiting around? There must be a better way!

Introducing Pressure Cooker Short Ribs! All the delicious flavor and fall-off-the-bone tenderness of your favorite short ribs -- in only a fraction of the time!

The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Challenge: Here's the Plan!

Wow! We apparently underestimated how many of you would join The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Challenge....

We said on Monday that we'd need at least 60 people, and we got more than five times that!

Super. Exciting. 

We had planned to put the magazines to a vote in order to decide which issue we'd use. But we hate to leave anybody out, so here's what we're going to do. We're capping The Cover-to-Cover Challenge at 350 participants (there are about 30 slots left). If you haven't already signed up, you can by leaving a comment on Monday's blog post. Readers are going to be divided into six teams.

Why six teams?

Because we're going to cook every recipe in six issues of our favorite October food magazines! Each of you will be assigned to one of the following: 

• Team Everyday Food (comfort food issue)
• Team Saveur (100 classic recipes)
• Team Bon Appetit (Family Style Feasts)
• Team Food & Wine (the wine issue -- don't worry, you don't have to make your own wine)
• Team Martha Stewart Living (the flavors of fall)
• Team Food Network Magazine (soups & stews, sandwiches & Fall-ness)

There will be Halloween food. There will be ethnic dishes. There will be layer cakes. There will be a ton of fun. 

So here's what happens next:

• By the end of the week we plan to have made dish assignments. 
• Each team will get a detailed email explaining what they need to do.
• We're going to all cook-cook-cook and then showcase what we did later in October. 

Sound good? We're excited. 

Come back tomorrow, when we'll resume our regularly scheduled program.

We're ready to cook some Fall dishes!

The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Challenge: Will You Join Us?

We have a running list of things we'd like to do here on the blog -- some of them we get to in short order, while some of them languish in Google doc purgatory.

One that's been on that list for a long time is to attempt to cook every recipe in a single issue of a food magazine over the course of a month. What would it be like to make 60+ new recipes in a month? And what would we learn from the experience?

Well, we still think it's a great idea, but every time it comes up, we balk because the month is too busy. But then we had an epiphany: What if you cooked along with us?!

So we're enlisting you, dear Bittens. Come on board for The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Challenge!

September Tomatoes, Weddings, and a Project

It seems that every time we step out into the garden, we come back with a little handful of tomatoes. The garden, which seemed a few weeks to be on its way out, is suddenly bursting with tomatoes and peppers. There isn't much else happening back there, but we don't mind. These late summer tomatoes are keeping us plenty happy.  

The tomatoes are sitting on our counter in little dishes. There are quite a few them at this point, even though we keep popping them like candy. With a nip in the air, it may be time to roast them and toss them with a simple pasta. If not, there are always heirloom salads and pairing them with meats.

This weekend, two of our closest friends are getting married. Clay is a groomsman and Zach is singing (did you know he sings?). It has us thinking about our wedding, which was just over two years ago. (Time flies!) We celebrated our anniversary earlier this week. We kept it simple for our "cotton" anniversary and made dinner at home. Unromantically, the entire meal was built around the theme of "things that are about to go bad." But we had a nice bottle of wine and enjoyed a night in, and it made us very happy. 

Next week we're going to announce a fun project for you to do with us in October. We're excited about the idea, and we hope you will be, too. It's going to require you to cook something -- we know you're going to hate that. 

Have a great weekend. Buy some apples. If it gets chilly where you are, haul out a sweater. We'll see you on Monday.

-- Zach & Clay 

 

Bon Appetit's Dish of the Year? Crispy Kale Salad with Lime Dressing

Bon Appétit (September 2012)

What's the best dish you've eaten so far this year?

Maybe it was something you had in a restaurant. Or maybe you made it yourself. 

Regardless, we would go out on a limb and bet that it wasn't a kale salad. But in Bon Appétit's September issue, which is devoted to showcasing restaurants around the country, restaurant editor Andrew Knowlton declares this Crispy Kale Salad with Lime Dressing the magazine's "Dish of the Year." 

Can a kale salad possibly live up to that title? We had to find out.

Chicken with Puebla-Style Mole Sauce

Saveur (September 2012)

The September issue of Saveur is a doozy. The Mexico Issue, which is obviously devoted to south-of-the-border cuisine, is one of those magazine issues that you want to file away and keep. It's almost more of a reference book on Mexican cooking, laying out the ingredients, flavors, kitchen tools and preparations that define that kind of cuisine (and the different regional cuisines within Mexico). It's great.

For some reason, out of all the choices in the issue, we were really drawn to the recipe for chicken in mole sauce. Neither of us was too familiar with mole. We've never ordered it in a Mexican restaurant, although we're sure we've tasted it when others have ordered it.

In fact, when we started thinking about it, we could only think two things about mole: "Isn't that that chocolate sauce that goes on meat? And doesn't it have, like, a ton of ingredients?"

Answer: Yes. And yes. 

Mole does in fact have a lot of ingredients. Twenty-four, in this recipe (not including the chicken). And a lot of them are Mexican ingredients that we thought would be hard to source -- pasilla chiles, canela cinnamon, piloncilo sugar, Mexican chocolate.

We almost skipped the whole affair. But then we thought, "Hold up! We live in the second-most heavily Hispanic neighborhood in D.C., and adjacent to the most heavily Hispanic. We can do this!"

So we hopped on our bikes and went on a hunt.

Grilled Okra with Red Curry-Lime Dressing

Food & Wine (September 2012)

Here's a confession: We haven't really cooked this week. 

We got home from vacation on Sunday and the cupboards were bare. We're talking vodka-in-the-freezer, ketchup-in-the-refrigerator-door bare. We knew we had to remedy that, so we went to the supermarket and picked up a few staples. Two days later, we got our weekly CSA share, so we've had a good amount of fresh vegetables in the house (okra, eggplant, arugula, a few tomatoes). 

But then we haven't really been motivated to do any focused cooking to share here with you. Oh, we've been eating at home. But it's been more of an improvised, no-recipe, throw-a-bunch-of-stuff-in-a-skillet kind of thing. Very, very simple.

It's been a nice respite. We've been been busy catching up at work, so it's been nice to spend less time in the kitchen. And the food we've been cooking has been very healthy, which is a nice break after decadent beach food. 

But simple food can be excellent food, and sometimes, the simplest recipes can really surprise you. 

Food & Wine's September issue happens to be full of recipes that are simple, in that they only have three ingredients (plus oil, salt and pepper). 

We're hard pressed to think of dishes in our regular rotation that only have three ingredients. Simple egg dishes? Very simple sautés? 

This recipe showcases the power of simple, because this Grilled Okra with Red Curry-Lime Dressing is a complete knock-out -- one of our favorite dishes we've cooked so far this year.  

Sugar Roasted Peaches

Fine Cooking (August/September 2012)

Fresh peach season is one of our absolute favorite times of year at the farmers market. But it's September now, which means fresh peaches are quickly dwindling from produce stands.

Depending on where you live, though, you might still be able to find a few stragglers from your favorite peach farmer. 

And you know what that means: Ruuuuuuuun!!! 

The Last Scene of Summer: Makers-and-Coke Cake

Here's how summer ended for us. 

We spent Saturday on the beach in North Carolina with 5 friends. It was a perfect day. Jumping waves in the ocean, bobbing along and waiting for the next big one. Sitting on the sand, each of us with a book in hand, trying to get through them before sundown. And talking about the fall, what we're looking forward to, what we're excited about, and, of course, what we look forward to eating. 

It also happened to be our friend Ralph's birthday. To celebrate, we decided to bake a cake. The drink of choice among our friends is Makers Mark bourbon from the great state of Kentucky, mixed with either a Coca-Cola, a Diet Coke or soda water.

The two of us were both quiet familiar with "Coke cakes," having grown up with them at countless church potlucks and family gatherings.

So in honor of Ralph's birthday, we thought, why not try a Makers-and-Coke Cake?