The Bitten Word

Our Menu Collection

About five years ago -- around the same time we started this blog -- we also started collecting menus.

We were visiting some great restaurants, and we really wanted to remember the meals. So we got in the habit of asking for a copy of the menu before leaving the restaurant. That turned into habit, and since then, we've amassed quite a stack of menus representing memorable meals.

We went digging for something in the menu stack the other day, and got lost browsing through the dishes and thinking about the food, remembering either what we ate, or who we were with. We thought you might like to see some of the menus and hear the stories. 

Here are a few of our favorites.

 

 

momofuku noodle bar - New York City - February 14, 2010

A few years ago, we somehow ended up in New York City on Valentine's Day -- with no dinner reservation and no plans. We decided to use the opportunity to make our first visit to momofuku noodle bar, and had an excelelnt time slurping ramen and diving into those legendary steamed pork buns. A Valentine's to remember. 

 

 

 

Hundred Acres - New York City - June 20, 2009 

We had been to see the most amazing production of Our Town at an Off-Broadway theater in the West Village, and we made a late dinner reservation at Hundred Acres in SoHo. It was one of those absolutely perfect nights -- we loved the food and it was an incredibly romantic meal. There was even a near-marriage proposal (but that ultimately happened several months later). And all thanks to Thornton Wilder. 

 

 

Broccoli Stalk Salad

Cooking Light (February 2013)

We've been eating a lot of broccoli in the past few months. And why not? It's packed with good nutrients, it's cheap, and it's just about the quickest vegetable side you can make. 

If we've got a little time, we'll chop the florets, toss them in olive oil and roast them in the oven. (That takes about 25 minutes.) If we're in a hurry, we'll chop the florets, steam them over some boiling water, and add a squeeze of lemon. (That takes about 4 minutes.)

But somewhere along the way, we asked ourselves a question. "Hey, selves," we said. "Why are we only using a third of each bunch of broccoli?"

And that's when we started eating broccoli stalks.

New Uses for Clementine Boxes

This time of year, we eat winter citrus like our lives depended on it.

Each week, we go through at least one five-pound box of clementines. We pack them on workdays for a midday snack, and at night we gobble them up after dinner as dessert.

Most of the time, we buy Darling Clementines, which come in simple wooden crates.

We love the zingy citrus, but we hate discarding all those great little boxes. So rather than just tossing them in the trash, we've found that old clementine boxes can be quite useful around the house.

Here's how we use reuse and recycle clementine boxes. 

Foolproof Soft Boiled Eggs

Cook's Illustrated (February 2013)

There's always a better way to cook something.

That could pretty much be the mantra of Cook's Illustrated, which is always on the hunt for the absolute best, most replicable, most consistent kitchen techniques. 

Take a soft-boiled egg. We all know how to make one, right? Drop a cold egg into boiling water for five minutes, remove it, wash under cold water, and crack open.

Cook's wasn't satisfied. That method is inconsistent at best, and if you want to cook two eggs, or four, or six, forget it. That method doesn't work anymore.

So Cook's set out to find a better way. 

The quest for the Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg is a perfect illustration of the exacting standards of Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen. In fact, developing a new method for the P.S.B.E. was a big part on a fascinating feature in the New York Times Sunday magazine last fall. Here's an excerpt:

I was at the meeting for the unveiling of the Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg. It’s one of those recipes that isolate the weird, wayward essence of the Cook’s Illustrated project, a seemingly boner-proof preparation that, when fixed with [Editor Christopher] Kimball’s unsparing eye, reveals itself to be fundamentally broken. And therein lies the narrative arc of the C.I. recipe — invariably it begins with the insuperable flaw, that through toil and experimentation is resolved in a sudden, improbable revelation that, in-house, is known as the aha moment. ...

The P.S.B.E. is slated for the January/February issue and falls to Andrea Geary, from the magazine’s stable of overeducated, underpaid editor/cooks who research, test and write the stories. While the 20ish editors around the table resemble bright children at a model U.N. convocation, Geary, a hale, wiry 46, is the one you want beside you aboard the helicopter when smoke begins to billow from the controls. Her mien expresses unfussy competence; before coming to the magazine, Geary cooked at an inn on the Scottish Highlands, roasting venison in a coal-burning stove for hunting parties of drunk Italians. Even among the high-strung editorial ranks at C.I., Geary is considered a little intense.

If you’re wondering what could be especially difficult about boiling an egg, you should have heard her. The Flaw — the unappetizing probability of either a chalky yolk or a runny white — occurs because the yolk gets cooked before the white, and the desired temperature window turns out to be harrowingly small, so the ideal preparation must set the white while leaving the yolk custardy, and not do it too rapidly. Oh, and tossing a fridge-temperature egg into boiling water will cause the air inside to expand and sometimes crack it, and apparently no two cooks can agree on exactly what simmering means, and third, the number of eggs must be compensated for by adjusting the amount of boiling water to keep cooking time constant. Geary recited further facts imperiling the P.S.B.E., and after a while the difficulty of boiling an egg at home with anything like success sounded to be on the order of a bone-marrow transplant. This appeared to please everyone, particularly Kimball, and the meeting moved on to Dressing Up Meatloaf.

“Most magazines don’t write about failure, but we do,” Kimball told me later. “Disaster in the kitchen puts the reader at ease, and that’s why we start our recipes with it.” 

We were sucked in by that story (you should read all of it!), and we couldn't wait to try the P.S.B.E. for ourselves when the issue finally arrived.

Chocolate-Chip Cookies with Red Miso Buttercream

Food & Wine (February 2013)

We took one look at the February Food & Wine and knew that we absolutely had to make this recipe. 

First, chocolate chip cookies with icing?

You have our attention. 

Second, chocolate + miso?

Go on....

Third, the recipe is from Chef Erik Bruner-Yang, whose D.C.-based restaurant we have visited and enjoyed. 

We put on our game faces and got to baking. 

 

50 Things We've Learned in 5 Years of Writing The Bitten Word

Well, here we are: It's our blogiversary, marking five (five!) years of writing The Bitten Word. 

A year ago, when we embarked on year five, we asked you to introduce yourselves, and we loved hearing from folks all over the world. If you haven't commented there yet, please do. They really make our day. 

This year, to mark the beginning of our sixth year of blogging, we thought we'd take a look back and share 50 Things We've Learned in 5 Years of Writing The Bitten Word. 

Here they are. 

1. Ingredients recommended by food magazines can be extremely difficult to find. This was the lesson from our very first recipe we posted, Pork Cheek and Black-Eyed Pea Chili. 

2. The Bittens -- that's right, you -- are a vast source of kitchen knowledge and eager to help us and others. In the comments of our very first post, we were astounded that someone asked a question about where to find pork belly in Cleveland, and another person quickly answered. Moments like this, of great, positive community, have been the highlight of these five years of blogging. 

3. Good food photography takes practice. One area where we've improved a lot is photography. Looking back at our first year of blogging, we shudder a bit at our photos. (Exhibit A.) As we've photographed more, we've learned some tricks of trade. Our equipment is slightly nicer now, but it's small things (natural light, a tripod) and practice that have really made a difference.

4. Food magazines -- like us -- are not infallible. Just as we make mistakes in the kitchen, every recipe featured in a food magazine is not perfect. We've had our share of disasters. Some have been our fault, others are due to faulty recipes. Our very first dud was a Banana Creme Pie from Bon Appétit. But there have been many, many more. 

5. White Lily flour makes the best biscuits. (Actually, we knew that long before we wrote it down.)

6. After trying countless roast chickens, Ina Garten's Lemon and Garlic Roast Chicken is still our favorite roast chicken recipe. We're suckers for the gravy.

7. Chocolate Gravy brings people together. That post has generated the most lovely notes and emails from people who also grew up eating it, and who write in to tell us about their family's version of the dish.

8. The people who work at food magazines are incredibly supportive of writers like us. We've heard from nearly all the magazines we cover at one point or another, with notes and comments about the dishes we write about from their magazines. 

9. Don't cook the berries. One thing we learned early on is that the food that comes out of your kitchen is not necessarily going to look like the photo in the magazine. Some of it will -- but a lot of it won't. Food photographers employ a lot of tricks, including undercooking certain elements of the food, in order to make them look prettier in the magazine. Case in point.

Shaved Rutabaga and Turnip Salad with Scallions

Fine Cooking (February 2013)

Forget endive.

Discard your red leaf.

And leave your radicchio in the cripser. 

It's shaved raw vegetable salads that are very "on trend" right now in food magazines. 

Over the last four months, Food & Wine (November), Bon Appétit (January), Martha Stewart Living (February) and now Fine Cooking (February) have all featured recipies for shaved salads that incorporate readily available cold weather produce -- think root vegetables, carrots, and winter squash.

The first time shaved salads really popped up on our radar was last summer, when Martha Stewart Living featured a Shaved-Squash Salad, and with it, featured a handheld Kyocera Mandoline that we couldn't resist purchasing ourselves. 

Let's talk first about owning a handheld mandoline. 

 

Bay Leaves: Worthless or Wonderful? Plus: Pressure-Cooker Chicken Stock

We have long been ambivalent about bay leaves.

When we mentioned offhand that we "sort of don't believe in" bay leaves as part of the note down within a recipe late last year, we were surprised by how many comments we received coming to the bay leaf's defense. Many of you wanted to know how the herb had done us wrong.

Here's how we fell out of love with bay leaves, and how we did a test this week to determine if we're just flat-out wrong. 

When we try out a new recipe, we are, for the most part, dutiful recipe followers. If a recipe calls for an obscure ingredient, we will hunt it down, even if that means multiple grocery store stops and lots of phone calls. And, because many recipes over the years have called for bay leaves, we've always purchased them, always fresh, never dried.

Here's how it always seems to go with bay leaves: We buy a pack and use one or two bay leaves in a recipe. We're never sure what contribution the leaf is making. We can barely smell it on its own, much less detect it in a soup, stew or broth. Nonetheless, we toss it in, per the recipe. The rest of the pack sits unused in the fridge until the leaves become brittle. We trash the old dead leaves. Next time there's a recipe that calls for bay leaves? Wash, rinse, repeat.

But the notes we got from you guys -- how you love bay leafs and consider them essential -- got us thinking. Are we wrong about bay leaves? Have we been "meh" on them for naught?

We decided to find out the best way we knew how. We made chicken stock. 

Warm Shrimp and Escarole Salad

Bon Appétit (February 2013)

We've been making lots of salads these days, mostly to atone for this, but also because in the crop of February magazines, it's the salad recipes that looked best to us.

Some are shaved salads; others make use of some unusual ingredients. But in this case -- a Warm Shrimp and Escarole Salad -- we loved the idea of a salad that won't chill your bones on a cold winter night.