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Hello, Bittens!
Just a quick note to say that we've fled to the beach for some much-needed downtime. We'll be cooking fresh seafood, catching up on some reading and generally doing not very much at all.
We'll be back next week with some great new recipes we can't wait to share with you!
Have wonderful week! Eat something amazing and do please tell us all about it.
--Zach and Clay
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Martha Stewart Living (July 2013)
What comes to mind when you hear "sherbet"?
For us, it instantly whooshes us straight back to childhood: Cool, creamy scoops of peach, raspberry, lime or -- best of all -- rainbow. And all of it in dreamy, sepia pastels -- like ice cream, only Instagrammed.
So we felt a wave of nostalgia when we saw a feature on sherbets in the July issue of Martha Stewart Living. It's actually a nice, lengthy feature that also includes recipes for ice creams and sorbets. But it was the sherbets that got us. Sour-Cherry and Lemon-Verbena. Canteloupe, Tarragon and Vodka. Avocado Cilantro.
Granted, those are some pretty grown-up riffs on a childhood favorite. So maybe it was our nostalgia that drew us to the least grown-up one in the bunch, this Blueberry Buttermilk Sherbet.
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Cooking Light (July 2013)
It dawned on us last week that we've now known each other for more than 10 years.
TEN years. A decade.
Can that possibly be true? The gray hairs on our heads would indicate it is.
To mark 10 years of Zach and Clay, we're celebrating with green beans. More on those in a minute.
Ten years ago, things were a bit different. We each had about a year of DC living under our belts. We were both working all-consuming jobs. In a transient city, we were trying to make friends who weren't about to move away.
But the biggest difference between 10 years ago and today? Food. Back then, we both rarely cooked. We lived in teensy apartments with doll-house-sized kitchens, so cooking was hard. When we did make food at home, it was more of the George-Foreman-chicken-breast-with-a-side-of-ramen variety.
As we got to know each other, we wanted to cook more. Eating at restaurants all the time wasn't doing any favors for our bodies, or our wallets. So we turned to cookbooks and food magazines to start learning some new dishes.
Continue reading "Steamed Green Beans with Lemon-Mint Dressing" »
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A recipe from The Bitten Word
Sometimes there's that moment when you're in a restaurant and you bite into something, and you immediately think, "I have got to learn to make this at home."
We had that experience in Puerto Rico, at small restaurant in Old San Juan.
Bittens, here's the story of the Purple Cloud.
While we were visiting Puerto Rico (and eating everything in sight), we had different schedules for the first few days. Zach was off with a photographer, reporting a story for his magazine.
Clay, meanwhile, had appointed himself guardian of the beach. On the first night, Clay wandered into Old San Juan for dinner, with no real destination in sight. He pulled up a few "best of" lists on Yelp and ended up at a pseudo-vegetarian restaurant called Verde Mesa.
The restaurant is quaintly quirky, like something furnished from your wacky French grandma's attic (or, you know, basically Anthropologie). But the food was great -- mostly vegetarian, some fish, all very fresh. Clay's meal was lovely.
But on the way out, Clay noticed a few diners enjoying an incredible-looking dessert. It was a big, frothy whip of purple, a creamy, pinkish peak piled high in a dish. And it looked amazing. Clay immediately vowed to return to Verde Mesa with Zach.
Two nights later, we were back at Verde Mesa. And there it was on the dessert menu, "the Purple Cloud." We ate it. We loved it. We could have ordered another. (We refrained.)
We knew we had to try making it ourselves.
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Sometimes we marvel at the smallest things in the kitchen.
Last week, we had an occasion to make meringues -- a new baking endeavor for us.
Meringues have very few ingredients -- they're mostly sugar and egg whites. But this mere combination of sugar and egg whites can transform so easily and quickly into something else altogether, that we found ourselves literally in awe in the kitchen.
We love that feeling, spurred by a moment of cooking when you know you've really witnessed something interesting. Or that you've learned to do something for the first time.
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It's officially midsummer. Between a few small trips we've taken over the last few months, we've read quite a few books. And with a bit of travel coming up for work and fun, we're thinking about what we're reading next.
We'd thought we'd offer a few of our recommendations -- and ask for some from you, as well.
So far this summer, we've read a couple books we really enjoyed. Here's what we recommend:
We both just finished reading Wonder, by R.J. Palacio. It's an incredibly sweet little book about a 10-year-old boy with a severe facial deformities, and what it's like when he starts school for the first time. (Technically, it's a young adult novel. But that's never kept us from enjoying something.)
Clay recently finished Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, which was a super enjoyable read, and quite funny. Zach's going to read it next.
For those of you who love both food and great food writing, read Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything. Steingarten, the food writer for Vogue, is new to us -- we learned about him from an interview with his former assistant, "Top Chef"’s Gail Simmons. But his food writing is our favorite we’ve encountered in some time -- funny, personal, informative, adventurous. The Man Who Ate Everything is worth picking up if only for the chapters about the fat-free craze of the '90s and truffle hunting in Italy.
We both just finished (and loved) reading Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, about a group of friends who meet at a summer camp and what happens in the following 40 years. It's popping up on lots of "summer beach reads" lists and we highly recommend it.
And lastly, while on a car trip in Kentucky, Clay recently listened to the audiobook of David Sedaris's Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. It had been a few years since one of us had read a Sedaris book, and he's still just as hilarious and funny as he was in Naked, Barrel Fever (our favorite), and Me Talk Pretty One Day. If you have occasion to listen to the audiobook of any of these, do! Sedaris is a gifted performer.
So that's what we've read that we recommend. What should we read next? Here's what's on our list so far.
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Bon Appétit (July 2013)
This is a tale of three parties.
Just a little less than 12 hours ago, we arrived home from Las Vegas, where we spent the last four days with a group of 15 friends for a bachelor party. What we ate: burgers, fries, pizza, pasta, barbecue, more pizza, tequila shots, a bit of sushi, waffles -- and that's just a starter list. There were pools, mechanical bulls, and a trip to a shooting range for some. It was a fun, hilarious weekend. But boy, do we need a salad....
The latest Bon Appétit, meanwhile, features a very different party, in Hawaii, thrown by chef Ed Kenney and singer Jack Johnson (who barely exists for us outside of Andy Samberg's impression of him Saturday Night Live). The Kenney-Johnson party is polar opposite from our Vegas bash: organic vegetables, no meat (though there is some tuna) and some famous faces, including surfer Kelly Slater. (The piece does include one quote that we find a bit irritating, though we're not sure why: "The guests' credo: Local first, organic whenever possible, with aloha always." Perhaps in our post-Vegas state, we're just not in the spirit of aloha.) All in all, though, it's a beautiful dinner party set at a long, outdoor table. The food looks virtuous and amazingly fresh. (Needless to say, we're going to try this week to be a bit more Hawaii and a lot less Vegas.)
And what about party No. 3?
Just prior to Vegas, Zach's parents were visiting DC with their friends Janet and Grant. We had them all to our house for dinner on Saturday night, and planned to keep things easy, since we'd be spending the day sightseeing with them. Preparing for that meal, we went digging through our magazine stack for a few simple dishes to execute. In Bon Appétit, we plucked out this recipe for Avocado and Tangerine Salad with Jalapeño Vinaigrette, from the Ed Kenney party in Hawaii.
Continue reading "Avocado and Orange Salad with Jalapeño Vinaigrette" »
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We bought these garlic blossoms at the farmers market a week ago, and we keep thinking they look like bursts of fireworks. Seems appropriate for this Independence Day week, so we thought we'd snap a photo and share it with you.
We're off for the rest of this week. We've got some fun things planned for the long weekend, and we'll be back with new posts next week.
Until then, have a safe and happy Fourth of July!
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What happens to a gelée deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
No. It melts into one globous, gelatinous mass.
After writing up the post about those Lemony Blackberry-Vodka Gelées, we took them on Sunday to Zach's sister Cassidy's house in Annapolis. She was throwing a crab boil, and we thought these gelées would be a great way to kick things off.
But.
The hour-long drive from DC proved too hot and sunny for our little Jello shots. By the time we arrived at Cassidy's, the individual gelées -- which we had worked so hard to pry out of the bowl and slice into perfect little cubes -- had oozed and congealed into one big mess.
(Forgive us, but it looked exactly like when a vampire gets staked on "True Blood." Only click on that if you want to see something truly unappetizing.)
Sure, the gelées still tasted delicious, but we couldn't bring ourselves to serve them and ask Cassidy's guests to grab a spoon and dig in.
But we did bring 'em back with us. And that grabbing-a-spoon-and-digging-in thing is still a very real possibility...
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Cooking Light (July 2013)
Once the provenance of frat houses and bachelorette parties, gelées now pop up occassionally in the pages of food magazines.
Whatever you do, don't call 'em Jello shots. They always go by their classier, more adult name, Gelée (which sounds like what we might name a baby we adopted from France).
In fact, in our third month of blogging here, more than five years ago, we featured Lemoncello Gelée from Martha Stewart Living at a going-away dinner party. It was love at first shot sight.
We're back with gelées today. The July issue of Cooking Light features the classiest looking gelées. With Fourth of July festivities ahead of us, we thought this might be the perfect recipe to get you ready for fireworks.
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