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You sharing this space with us brings us immense joy, and we're so humbled that after all these years, you still come by to read and share and cook and laugh.
We hope that you and your loved ones have an excellent holiday season.
Cook something new.
Eat something amazing.
And love every moment of it.
We'll see you back here in January!
~ Zach and Clay
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Bittens, we are away.
As in very away.
As in traipsing around Southeast Asia on a bit of an adventure.
But don't despair! There's plenty of holidayness here still to go around.
After all, we've given you a bit of a holiday survival guide:
And if those don't suit your fancy, there are always Our Favorite Holiday Recipes.
There will still be another post or two over the next few weeks, so check back for those. And if you want to follow along on our Thailand adventure, we're likely posting photos over on Instagram.
Make something delicious -- and please tell us all about it!
~ Zach and Clay
image via wikipedia
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Vegetarian Times (December 2013)
Do you have a New Year's tradition?
We were smitten with a feature in the latest Vegetarian Times, about traditional New Year's Eve foods from around the world.
Being from the South, we've long been familiar with eating hog jowl, black-eyed peas and collard greens on New Year's Day. In fact, we once attended a New Year's Eve wedding in Memphis, and at midnight they trotted out little cups of peas and greens. It was adorable, and we had good luck for exactly 12 months following that night. Okay, that part's not true, but the peas and greens were delicious.
Back in college, Clay had a friend from Colombia who introduced him to a tradition of eating grapes at midnight and making wishes while doing so.
Vegetarian Times doesn't have grapes. But it does include a recipe for black-eyed peas and greens, as well as New Year's traditions we'd never heard of: eating lentils in Brazil, split peas in Germany, black soybeans in Japan.
We went for the Coconut Lentils.
Continue reading "New Year's Eve Traditions: Coconut Lentils" »
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Bon Appétit (December 2013)
Say, have you seen the cover of the December Bon Appétit yet?
No? Take a gander.
Pretty stunning, isn't it?
Those gorgeously bold cookies on a striking black-and-white plate are so elegant and so...elevated. It's like Christmas stripped of all the kitsch. Like an Art Deco Christmas. Like spending the holidays with Marlene Dietrich in Berlin.
Wait...where were we? Right.
Cookies.
We wanted some. And Bon Appétit had just the thing: Chocolate-Pistachio Sablés.
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Garden & Gun (December 2013)
Sure, chicken is in our holiday survival bunker.
But so is whiskey. And it's already come in handy this year.
For Thanksgiving last week, we stayed in D.C. Our friends Trevor and Owen offered to host, and a crowd of nine of us gathered for dinner. We were asked to bring cocktails and dessert. We considered a second run at the pumpkin-y Pilgrimage Cocktail, which we had liked very much. But we always love an opportunity to try a new recipe.
So we chose this Holiday Whiskey Punch from Garden & Gun.
First, let's talk about the magazine. How is it, exactly, that we haven't yet talked about Garden & Gun with you??
We made mention of it over a year ago, and haven't quite circled back to it yet. If you haven't seen an issue before, the content is a mix of food, sport and Southern culture. There's not quite as much food in each issue as we might like (which is perhaps one of the reasons we haven't cooked from it before). But the magazine is beautiful and the photographry is absolutely georgous. If you have someone on your holiday list who loves magazines but might enjoy something a bit more unusual, give them Garden & Gun. Seriuosly. We have so many friends who have subscribed in the past few years, and they all love it as much as we do.
Don't worry, though -- there are no guns in this punch. Let's talk about it.
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Cook's Country (December 2013/January 2014)
If we were building a holiday season survival bunker, we'd fill it with a bunch of chicken breasts.
Sure, we're going to parties, and happy hours, and tree trimmings. We even went to an early Christmas dinner (beef tenderloin! horseradish sauce!) earlier this week with friends.
But when we're not on the holiday circuit, we're eating lean. So there's chicken. Lots and lots of chicken. And brocolli. And sweet potatoes. Boring, but true.
And we are the No. 1 offenders of cooking a boring chicken breast, with a little seasoning, tossed in the oven, and simply baked. It's easy, and tasty enough, but those dishes aren't going to win any awards.
Cook's Country had our number with their "Chicken Baked in Foil" feature, with three takes on chicken that gives you the lightness of chicken breasts, but with amped-up flavor.
We selected Chicken Baked in Foil with Sweet Potato and Radish and got to work.
Continue reading "Chicken Baked in Foil with Sweet Potato and Radish" »
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Way back in October, before the mad run-up to Thanksgiving began, we went to New York with Zach's parents and sister. It was a double birthday celebration of sorts, for Zach and his mom Brenda, who both have birthdays in October.
We ate at Momfuku's Má Pêche (with an obligatory stop at Milk Bar), had an incredible brunch at the Standard Grill, and celebrated birthdays at Union Square Cafe.
The rest was art, shopping, the High Line, and, well, more eating.
As the two of us were preparing for the trip, we thought it might be fun to do a test kitchen drop-in while we were in town. And since we had just been in touch with the staff at Bon Appétit because of the Cover to Cover Challenge, we asked them if we could come by. They said sure, so we did!
It was a Thursday afternoon at the end of October. Danielle, who works for BonAppetit.com, gave us the tour.
Our only point of reference for a test kitchen is when we visited the kitchens at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia a couple years ago. Martha HQ was like a little city-state, with each department of her company bordering another, in massive open-loft floors of housewares, pillows, outdoor furniture, and yes, magazines. It's like a warehouse. Or a temple.
Bon Appétit, on the other hand, feels much more like a traditional office. It's in the Condé Naste building in Midtown. All the magazines are there: Vogue (we saw Hamish Bowles in the lobby), GQ, Vanity Fair. Bon Appétit occupies one of the floors.
We got to see where the editorial team works (we saw editor Adam Rapoport meeting with some folks to talk about an upcoming layout). We hit the small photo studio, and we got to tour the actual test kitchens.
You'd get a kick out of seeing the test kitchens in person. The biggest surprise is how modest the facilities are. Rather than state-of-the-art appliances in gleaming, spacious rooms, the BA test kitchens look, well, a whole lot like our own small apartment kitchen. Granted, there are 6 identical kitchen bays, but each one is essentially a cramped little kitchen with fairly basic equipment. There isn't a lot of room to move -- everything is within arm's reach.
In fact, some of the kitchens are in slight disrepair. They happen to be the old Gourmet test kitchens (moment of silence, please). One oven door was hanging off its hinges. One of the employees there told us that since Condé Nast is relocating to the Freedom Tower, some things are just going to stay broken until the move.
No doubt the test kitchens in the new space will be a bit fancier. But our guide Danielle told us they actually made a point of keeping everything modest and on the same scale a home cook would have. We loved that!
We can't say what they were cooking that day (we weren't allowed to photograph food), but here are a few scenes from the test kitchen.
Enjoy!
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