The Bitten Word

Our Favorite Holiday Recipes

Hello, Bittens!

We will continue with our Thanksgiving 2013 coverage tomorrow -- with our exhaustive index of every recipe from all of this year's big food magazines.

But today we wanted to highlight some of our all-time favorite holiday recipes. These are the best dishes we've cooked for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and any other time you want a special holiday meal.

You can read our Favorite Holiday Recipes here, and we're adding a link on the left column of the blog that we'll keep up all holiday season, so you can easily find great inspiration for all sorts of wonderful foods.

What about you?  Any holiday must-haves?  Let us know in the comments!

Thanksgiving 2013: This Year's Big Trends

"Not So Humble Pie."

"Mad About Mashes." 

"The Life of Pie." 

"The Great Pumpkin Challenge." 

"Nuts, Butter, Hearts Aflutter."

Thanksgiving is here! These are just a few of the headlines we have endured enjoyed while poring through this year's issues of Thanksgiving magazines. But never fear, there's a lot of excitement in the ideas and trends for Thanksgiving 2013. And we're here to tell you all about it.

As you may know from previous years, we're a little bit obsessed with Thanksgiving. Food magazines give it their all -- trying to one-up last year's turkey, reinvent classic pies and find a place to cram more of this year's 'it' ingredient. And we enjoy following every move.

Today, we'll discuss the trends in this year's coverage as we see them. Later this week we'll share an index of every recipe from this year's Thanksgiving magazines, so you can dive in and explore everything you might want to add to this year's Thanksgiving table. Then, over the next three weeks, we'll post a Thanksgiving recipe every day, to let you know our thoughts on what to make and what to skip this year.

And one more order of business. This post is filled word clouds we made that illustrate the frequency of certain words being used in recipe titles. The graphic at the top is made from every word in this year's recipe titles. The bigger the word, the more frequent (for instance, there's more pie than turkey this year). Lots of words that are only used once or twice don't appear. Make sense?

Enough talk.

Let's dig in! 

Microwaved Coffee Cup Molten Chocolate Cake for Two

Cook's Country (November 2013)

Back when we first wrote about Microwave Chocolate Cake, we we nearly apologetic for even introducing it to you. 

Chocolate cake, made from scratch and ready to eat in less than 5 minutes? It's like a wonderful gift you're not sure you can trust to have in your house.

We were equal parts ecstatic and terrified of that recipe. We do not need much of an excuse to treat ourselves. And in the two years since, we've made the cakes a handful of times whenever we've had the ingredients on hand. 

That recipe, though, is "good enough." Given how quickly you can go from zero to chocolate cake, we were willing to let go the fact that the cake could be spongy, and dry, and sometimes a bit chewy. It was not great, but for a cake you make in your microwave in a few minutes? Like we said: good enough. 

Enter America's Test Kitchen, who this month offers a serious upgrade on the Coffee Cup Microwave Chocolate Cake.

And it's an upgrade that works flawlessly. 

Duck Confit with Spicy Pickled Raisins

Bon Appétit (October 2013)

Dinner parties can be a great excuse to make an ambitious dish you've been wanting to try.

But sometimes it's the other way around: Making an amibitious dish can be a wonderful excuse for a dinner party.

That was the case with this Duck Confit with Pickled Raisins. The moment we saw it in this month's Bon Appétit, we knew we'd be making it. We loved the notion of pickled raisins. Paired with duck confit, it sounded like a perfect autumn meal.

But it's undoubtedly ambitious: Duck legs are pricey, and the cook time here is a solid five hours.

We needed an excuse. 

What we needed was a dinner party.

Baked Winter Squash Soup

The New Basics

Back in July, we got a note from Margie, a reader who's been with us since nearly the beginning.

For years we've traded emails back and forth, with recipe recommendations and tips and such. 

Margie doesn't live far from us, and this year she had a little gardening adventure, planting Marina del Chioggia squash.

Turns out Margie's squash were extremely productive. So at the end of August, Margie asked if we'd like to have one. Would we? Of course! Margie's daughter kindly dropped off a big ol' winter squash on our doorstep so we could play around with it. 

Big is the operative word here. Here's a look at the squash itself. Want to guess how much it weighs? 

Red Cabbage Salad with Curried Seitan

Vegetarian Times (October 2013)

Seitan.

If you cook vegetarian dishes long enough, eventually you'll wind up cooking seitan. It's a "high-protein wheat gluten product" that's a staple of meatless meals.

Frankly we've always found it a little, well, gross-looking. (And yes, it's pronounced like the devil.)

But, hey, we're always up for trying something new.

So we decided to try this Red Cabbage Salad with Curried Satan -- sorry, Seitan.

Kohlrabi and Apple Salad with Caraway

Bon Appétit (October 2013)

Spring and summer salads are so easy. You can just look around, grab a handful of whatever produce you see, and toss it with some oil and vinegar. Tender lettuces in the early spring? Spicy arugula at the start of summer? Delicious -- and effortless.

Autumn and winter salads take a little more work. Of course there are still wonderful fruits and vegetables to be had. But fall and winter salads require a little more thoughtfulness. Often they rely on ingredients other than greens. And we've made plenty of them. Celery and Fennel. Rhutabaga and Turnip. Squash. Squash. And more squash. 

We couldn't resist trying one more, with Bon Appetit's Kohlrabi and Apple Salad with Caraway. 

Roasted Broccolini with Marjoram

A Bitten Word Recipe
Inspired by The Spotted Pig

Last week Zach was in New York for a couple days for a conference. It was two long days of sessions (albeit really interesting ones).

But the night before the conference started, Zach made it into the city with enough time to catch a show. He saw a one-man play called Buyer & Cellar, which was really quite great. The show is Off Broadway, in a great tiny little theater in Greenwich Village. 

After the show let out, Zach was a little peckish. And he knew just where to walk: The Spotted Pig. We both love that restaurant, and late on a quiet, cool Sunday night, it was a little corner of heaven right there in the West Village. Warm and inviting and wonderful.

Zach grabbed a seat at the bar and checked out the menu. He ended up ordering a great crispy-seared mackerel with crème fraîche and mint vinaigrette, which was delicious.

And he ordered the Roasted Broccolini with Marjoram. With the first bite, he knew he wanted us to recreate it at home.

We're Going to Thailand -- Got Any Tips?

Can we bother you with a shameless plea for advice?

We've made a sort of late in the game decision to head to Thailand in a few months. And now we're furiously piecing together an itinerary and plans and thought some of you -- The Bitten Word brain trust! -- might have excellent Thailand related advice for us. 

We'll be in the country for two full weeks. Roughly we're thinking we'll do some time in Bangkok, some time in the north around Chiang Mai, and then some island hopping in the south. We're excited just explore and eat as much as we can. 

If you happen to have visited Thailand or have great recommendations for us, we'd love to hear them, be it a place to stay, something to see, and especially something or somewhere to eat. 

Thanks in advance for the advice! 

(And don't worry. We'll bore you to death about Thailand after we go. Just like we did with our trips to China and Argentina.)

Image: Wiki Commons

Braised Spanish-Style Chicken

Martha Stewart Living (October 2013)

Choosing chicken dishes to feature here on The Bitten Word always leaves us conflicted. 

On the one hand, we love chicken. Love it. We eat it more than any other protein. It is our go-to, our comfort, our "oh-no-it's-so-late-what-are-we-having-for-dinner-oh-let's-just-have-chicken." 

On the other hand, according to a quick search of our Recipe Index, we've featured more than 50 chicken dishes on this blog. That, friends, is a lot of poultry. 

But still, we love it. And we assume many of you do, too. So we continue to do some chicken dishes here. But we're choosy. We want them to be special, different, something that we and you likely haven't done with chicken before. 

The October Martha Stewart Living features a "Chicken Playbook," with five different methods for cooking the dish. There's a roasted spatchcocked chicken (and you all know how much we like spatchcocking), broiled tandoori wings, baked legs, and sauteed paillards. Those all look very good and we're sure we would enjoy them, but we were drawn to the braised Spanish-Style Chicken.