The Bitten Word

Minute Steak Stacks with Montreal Seasoning and Herbed Anchovy Butter

Food & Wine (February 2014)  

In this Polar Vortex of our Discontent, we've been hunkering down at home, tinkering in the kitchen and doing our best to keep warm. It's been a soup-and-stew-and-sweet-potatoes kind of week. But we've also been trying a few things that are more out of the ordinary. And minute steak is definitely out of the ordinary for us. 

Minute steak -- or cube steak -- is definitely a throwback. When's the last time you saw a minute steak recipe in a current food magazine? We can't recall seeing one in the last six years, and we read a lot of magazines. The minute steak lives in another era for us, the kind of dish Betty might have made for Don, back in happier times. 

And though we're intrigued by minute steaks (this is our first experience cooking one), we were more drawn to this recipe because it uses "Montreal steak spice," which is a new concept to us. Our interest was also piqued by the Herbed Anchovy Butter -- mostly because we didn't think it sounded like a great idea.

But in the spirit of experimentation, we made a double batch and had Zach's parents over for dinner during a recent visit.

Taking a Cooking Class in Chiang Mai -- Watch the Videos!

Chiang Mai, Thailand, is absolutely filled with food. Everywhere -- everywhere! -- there are restaurants, street carts and sidewalks packed with food vendors. Sprawling open-air markets are filled with fresh fruits, dried fish, sweet treats and kaep mu (which you may know better as pork rinds). Night markets spring up all over the city, with vendors frying chicken, ladling curries or cooking sweet desserts like the addictive kanom krok.

The entire city, especially after nightfall, is filled with the wonderful aromas of all these foods -- smoky charcoal-grilled meats, spicy chile sauces, savory noodle dishes.

We have never in our lives seen a place so intertwined with eating. It's amazing.

So it was a no-brainer that we would take a cooking class while we were there. Chiang Mai boasts more than 30 cooking schools and culinary classes, according to a TripAdvisor search. 

A friend had recommended Siam Rice Thai Cookery School -- she said it had been a wonderful experience when she was in Thailand earlier last year. So we'd reserved a couple spots before we left for our trip.

On the day of our reservation, a songthaew pulled up to our hotel. (A songthaew is a popular mode of transportation in Thailand -- a converted pick-up truck with benches in the bed and a roof. You see them everywhere.) We piled in with the six other tourists taking the class with us, and we sped off.

A Visit to a Thai Food Market -- A Photo and Video Tour

One thing we really enjoy when traveling abroad is checking out the food markets in foreign cities. Grocery stores, high-end food halls, down-and-dirty meat markets, even convenience stores -- walking through these places gives you such a great sense of the foodways of a place.

So we loved checking out a few food markets while we were in Thailand last month.

We couldn't help but compare the experience to our visits to wet markets in China a couple years ago.  

Now, we're certainly not experts on food markets in either China or Thailand ... but that's not about to stop us from making some generalizations! We visited three wet markets in China and three in Thailand (including Or Tor Kor market in Bangkok, which is a great site, especially if you're at the nearby Chatachuk weekend market).

On the whole, the Thai markets were much less crazy than the Chinese markets we visited, and much closer to Western farmers markets. In China, we saw cages with live rabbits and chickens, tubs of live snakes and turtles. (And, yes, dog.)

We saw none of that at the markets we visited in Thailand. The fruits and vegetables were arrayed in beautiful rows and piles. The properly butchered meat was hanging on racks. Pork rinds sizzled and popped in hot oil. Women fried chicken in huge woks.

Here are a few photos from the markets, to give you a sense of what's on offer, and below, a video compiling some short clips we shot while walking around. 

But first...do you know what's pictured above? We do not, though we loved its Christmasy colors. If you know, please share!

Beautiful peppercorns

 

Making Pistachio Milk and Other Homemade Nut Milks

Bon Appétit (January 2014)

 

YOU GUYS.

We need to talk to you about the oatmeal at  Le Diplomate, a French restaurant that opened in D.C. this past year.

Okay, allow us to back up. When we go out for brunch, we aren't the kind of people who order oatmeal.  Steak and eggs? Yes. Omelets? Eggs benedict? Right here. Hash? Absolutely.

We love a savory brunch dish. But those yogurt parfaits? The fruit cups? The oatmeal? They're for chumps. 

Well, when we go to brunch at Le Diplomate, consider us chumps. Because we never miss the oatmeal.

Their take on the dish features steel cut oats, pistachio milk, and fresh citrus. And it is divine -- sweet and rich and hands-down the best oatmeal we've ever had. And that's saying something, because since we learned to shortcut the process for making steel-cut oats in less than 10 minutes, we have eaten our fair share of oatmeal, dressed up more ways than a Barbie at a daycare. 

We've toyed with the idea of trying Le Diplomate's pistachio oatmeal at home. But we never had, mostly because we don't have ready access to pistachio milk. 

But Bon Appétit has solved that problem for us, with their January feature about making homemade nut milks. We took one look at the recipe and immediately started making a batch. 

Brussels Sprouts and Leeks with Lime-Ginger Butter

Fine Cooking (January 2014)

There are recipes that make people fall in love with Brussels sprouts. And then there are recipes that reinforce one's preconceived notions of why one don't like Brussels in the first place, conjuring childhood memories of standoffs at the dining room table and refusal to finish. Your. Plate. 

We discovered early on in our cooking adventures that Brusselphobes could be converted to Brusselphiles in one easy step: roasting. Oven-roasting sprouts keeps them crisp and gives them a gorgeous golden caramelization that's really tasty. (Bacon and apples never hurt, either.)

Then there are dishes like this Brussels Sprouts and Leeks with Lime-Ginger Butter.

We were split. Did we like this? We're not totally sure.

So we came up with a little game of Choose Your Own Adventure: Journey to Brussels Sprouts.

Ready to play?

The 7 Most Unusual Things We Ate in Thailand

We were walking down a side street in Bangkok, when an older woman in front of a small restaurant caught our eye. She was waving us in, enticing us to come in for a bite. Next to her, on a pedestal, was a glass platter filled with cockles.

The woman prodded them a bit, causing the still-live cockles to blink and writhe. "She's trying to show you they're fresh," whispered our guide Chow. "Now, I will tell you that, while those cockles are probably fine to eat, the water they're harvested in is definitely not clean. But you can try them if you want."

We wavered, and then decided to plunge inside and order a plate.

Such was our time in Thailand. We decided to say yes to trying knew things, no matter how off-the-radar they might be for us. For the most part, this ended up great! (But we'll talk about those cockles again in a minute.)

Unlike when we were in China a couple years ago, there wasn't much we encountered in Thailand that seemed like a dare. No stinky tofu, no scorpions on sticks. (We did once see a table of people sharing a grub salad at a restaurant in Chiang Mai. We declined to order that one.)

Anyway, here are the most unusual things we ate while on our trip.

The Best Things We Ate in Thailand

 

We arrive in Bangkok in the dark.

At the airport, we find a guy holding a sign that reads: "Mrs. Zach Patton." Eh, close enough. The car ferries us to our hotel. It's close to midnight. After a full 24 hours of travel, we are dirty, hungry and want to get to sleep quickly. After dropping our bags, we walk a few blocks down the nearly-deserted street to a corner store. We emerge with water and peanuts.

On our way out of the store, we notice three men standing around a small cart with a smoking grill. They're nibbling and dipping and nibbling some more. We walk up and buy two skewers of tangy, spicy chicken. There are vats of sauces. The oldest of the men points to the sauce he thinks we should try. It's oniony and spiked with chiles, both sweet and spicy. We dip and bite. Nothing has ever tasted better.

That chicken, from the simplest of street food carts, is our first real taste of Thailand. But it's only the beginning of a long list of delicious dishes we ate while exploring the country.

We'd been extremely excited about our trip, which we took over the past two weeks of December. We were eager to experience bustling Bangkok, outdoorsy Chiang Mai in the north, and Thailand's famous beaches in the south. More than anything, we'd been excited about the food. 

And it was amazing. On the whole, the food was outstanding. (The worst thing we can say is that we had one meal that was relatively bland. Other than that we loved just about every dish we ate.) Noodles, soups, spicy salads, fresh fruit -- everything we tasted was great.

But we thought we'd try to break it down for you, Bittens, to give you a sense of some of the best things we ate during our trip.

Here's a glimpse at our favorite dishes from our trip to Thailand.

Chinese-Style Poached Chicken with Pear and Orange

Food & Wine (January 2014)

It's the beginning of the year, and it's a safe assumption that at least some of you are starting the year on a healthy note (whatever "healthy" means to you).

We're not resolutions people (only Clay has made one: to listen to more music this year). In past years we've set Culinary Resolutions -- things we want to eat, drink and try -- and we highly recommend that you do the same. It's nice to think about what you will do, versus what you won't. How about we all just be good to ourselves this year? 

Anyhow: this Chinese-Style Poached Chicken with Pear and Orange. We didn't pick it out of January's Food & Wine because of its relative healthfulness (though this dish is on the light side); instead, we chose it out because we've somehow never poached chicken. How is it possible that we've been cooking like fiends for more than six years and still have poached chicken to share with you? 

We grabbed some chicken, boiled some water, and got started. 

Roasted Butternut Squash with Browned Butter and Hazelnuts

Cook's Illustrated (January/Februrary 2014)

We love traveling. By which we mean, we love eating while traveling.

Sure, we enjoy exploring foreign cities, wandering through different museums, seeing historic sites and traipsing around churches and temples. But mostly, we're there for the food.

The only downside of all that food travel is that we miss cooking. After a couple weeks of restaurant meals three times a day, we're always eager to get back in our own kitchen and make some food ourselves.

As you may or may not know, we just got back from couple weeks in Thailand. (We'll have photos and stories and a full food rundown for you soon.) When we got back last week, one of the first things we did was head for the grocery store. We stocked up on staples -- which for us, this time of year, means things like chicken breasts, sweet potatoes, broccoli and winter squash.

We always like cooking butternut squash, but we're never extremely creative with it. We peel it, dice it, add spices, toss it in oil and roast it. It's plenty good, but it's nothing special.

Apparently we have the same thing in common with America's Test Kitchen's Dan Souza. In the current issue of Cook's Illustrated, Souza writes about how his standard prep of butternut squash -- tossed in butter or olive oil and roasted -- was perfectly fine but a little boring. To mix up his routine, Souza was inspired by Yotem Ottolenghi's cook book Plenty, in which the London chef caramelizes squash and plays off its sweetness by adding savory notes of chile, lime, yogurt or toasted nuts.

We decided to follow suit.

Our 10 Favorite Food Magazine Recipes of 2013

And a Few Other Recipes Thrown in for Fun

We're back! And we're really excited about 2014! 

Not even a week ago we were sitting on a beach in Thailand, talking about all kinds of things we'd like to do here on The Bitten Word this year.

There's much to share about what we saw and ate in Southeast Asia, but we wanted to kick off the new year with a quick look back at 2013, with Our 10 Favorite Food Magazine Recipes of 2013. 

Here they are, in no particular order. You can click the images to visit the posts, and a read a brief write-up of each below. 

[click on the images or read a brief description of each dish below] 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chocolate Chip Cookies with Red Miso Buttercream (Food & Wine): One of our all-time favorite salty, sweet combinations.

Fish in Crazy Water (Food & Wine): Incredibly simple and flavorful. 

Oil Poached Tuna with Fennel and Orange (Food & Wine): The results are gorgeous and delicious.

Stir-Fried Asparagus with Shiitake Mushrooms (Cook's Illustrated): A perfect method for spring asparagus.

Avocado and Orange Salad with Jalapeño Vinaigrette (Bon Appétit): Long live spicy salads.

Peanut-Basil Relish (Southern Living): "It's like Pesto and Gremolata hooked up and eloped to Thailand."

Heirloom Tomatoes with Cherries, Balsamic, and Hyssop (Martha Stewart Living): We were smitten with cherries + tomatoes. 

Kohlrabi and Apple Salad with Caraway (Bon Appétit): Our favorite salad dressing of the year. 

Roasted Onion and Chestnut Compote (Saveur): Perfect decadence at Thanksgiving. 

Carrot Mash with Orange and Mint (Fine Cooking): Our favorite recipe from the 2013 holidays.