The Bitten Word

Our 11 Favorite Grilling Recipes

With Memorial Day behind us, summer is officially here. And for us, that means grill season!

We love cooking on the grill -- the flavor, the flame, the ritual, the not-heating-up-our-tiny-kitchen. So we thought we'd share with you our 11 favorite grilling recipes for the upcoming summer season. 

We're off next week for some downtime at the beach. But we'll be back with a full food report, and we've got some fun things planned for June.

In the meantime, get grilling! It's going to be an awesome summer.

 

Burgers with Blue Cheese Mayo and Sherry Vidalia Onions

Every bite of these burgers has the perfect mix of sweet and vinegar and salty and cheesy and peppery and buttery amazingness. Get the recipe.

  

Spicy Korean Grilled Pork

Simple, perfect grilled pork with a delectable Korean sauce. Get the recipe. 

 

Scenes from Spring: The Past Few Months in Photos

Happy (nearly) summer, Bittens!  We hope you had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend -- and we hope you're as excited as we are for a summer full of good times and great food.

But first, we wanted to share some of our photos from this spring. We had a terrific spring -- some nice travel, a few lovely weddings, and some memorable meals. Many of these photos are from our Instagram feed. (If you're not following us over there, come on and join the fun!)

This new couch arrived on the first day of spring. The teal has taken a little getting used to, but we love it.

 

You may remember this photo from our trip to New Orleans. You can read way more about what we did on that trip -- by which we mean eating and drinking -- in this post. 

 

Spring came so late this year!  And it was so cool and gloomy. We took lots of photos of pretty bright colors to make us feel better, whether it was a row of books in a New Orleans bookstore, a Morris Louis painting at the National Gallery of Art, a chalk drawing on the street in our neighborhood, or some technicolor carrots.

 

Sugar Snap Peas with Mint and Warm Coconut Dressing

Food & Wine (May 2014)

The other day, we got to chatting with some friends about the first live concert each of us had ever seen. (For Clay: Billy Ray Cyrus. For Zach: R.E.M. God, we just dated ourselves.)

Anyway, the conversation turned to upcoming concerts of throwback bands. One friend said she was about to go see 10,000 Maniacs.

"Oh," we said. "We didn't know Natalie Merchant was touring!"

"She's not," our friend said. "I didn't realize it when I bought to tickets, but, um, it's just the Maniacs."

Just the Maniacs? No offense, but Natalie was the star of the show, the reason to be there. Seeing "the Maniacs" is like seeing just the E Street Band, or just the Blowfish, or just the Pips.

Why are we yammering about frontmen? Because, like a headliner concert band, these Sugar Snap Peas with Mint and Warm Coconut Dressing have a clear star -- and would probably work just as well as a solo act.

Want to guess who's the frontman here?

Walnut Brownie Cookies

Martha Stewart Living (May 2014)

We've all been there.

You've been invited to a dinner -- or a cookout, or a party, or a bat mitzvah or whatever -- and you need to take a dish. That's when the internal debate starts. Buy something? Make something? Buy something and pretend like you made something?

Personally, we're fans of the "oh we've got to make something but we've waited 'til the last minute what can we make with what's in the cupboards???" approach.

All that stops now, with this recipe for Walnut Brownie Cookies. This is your new go-to dessert recipe for summer gatherings.

These cookies won't only make you a good guest. They'll make you insanely popular, funnier and better looking*.

Ayam Jeruk (Grilled Chicken and Toasted Coconut Salad)

Saveur (May 2014)

Wanderlust.

We have it.

Bad. 

We blame Saveur, but we want to pass it on to you, too. 

You see, the May issue of Saveur is a bit different from typical editions of the magazine. Titled "A Day of Cooking," it progresses through a 24-hour day following stories of food and people from around the world.

At 6:21 a.m., someone is ordering brioche French toast from room service in L.A.'s Bel-Air Hotel. By 3:34 p.m., we're having afternoon snacks in Abu Dhabi. Later, in the wee hours of the morning, we're in a chef's home making quesadillas as a late night meal. It's an inventive, fresh issue, and each story has a corresponding recipe. 

We fell in love at first read in Indonesia (2:00 p.m.), with the description of Ayam Jeruk, "an addictive warm salad of grilled shredded chicken and roasted coconut tinged a bright yellow from fresh turmeric roots."

If we can't jaunt to Bali, we were at least going to give this recipe a shot. 

But just like we're substituting this dish for a trip to the Indonesian isles, we had to make a lot of substitutions in this recipe itself. 

As you might expect from an exotic recipe, there are several ingredients here that you ain't gonna find at Harris Teeter. In fact, we couldn't find the following ingredients at either Harris Teeter, Whole Foods or the tiny Japanese market in our neighborhood that we always kind of forget is very specifically Japanese and not, in fact, a pan-Asian superstore:

• Asian shallots
• Balinese long pepper
• Candlenuts
• Galangal
• Indonesian shrimp paste
• a Holland chile

On top of that, we accidentally bought two young coconuts at Whole Foods instead of two regular ol' mature coconuts, thinking they'd be interchangeable. They're not. Young coconut meat is more of a soft gel consistency and doesn't shred or toast. So we ran out and bought a bag of unsweetened shredded coconut. (One exotic item we did have on hand was fresh Kaffir lime leaves, thanks to a little potted Kaffir lime tree we bought a few years ago and have somehow kept alive. We love having it -- the leaves add a wonderful flavor to stir-frys and other dishes. And they make a killer martini when muddled with gin.)

Anyway, after all those substitutions, is it even worth making this Ayam Jeruk?

Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes.

Rhubarb & Beets

Martha Stewart Living (May 2014) 

We can totally picture the pitch meeting for this recipe at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia HQ: 

 

MARTHA STEWART (let's pretend she actually attends these things), to table of editors: What's next? Okay, the May issue. 

EDITOR 1: Right. Well, I've been really wanting to do something highlighting spring pea tendrils.

MARTHA: No.

EDITOR 1: Well, I was just thinking, you know, it's spring, it's warm, they'd be--

MARTHA: No. Who else?

EDITOR 2: Uh, I had thought maybe we could do a seasonal feature on, um, fava beans?

MARTHA: Fava beans? What is this, 2009? Why is no one prepared for this meeting?

EDITOR 3, [meekly]: Um, I did have one, um, idea--

MARTHA: Who's speaking?

EDITOR 3: I, um .. I am?

MARTHA: And? We're all waiting.

EDITOR 3: What about rhubarb---

MARTHA, [witheringly]: Rhubarb?

EDITOR 3: Yes. But ... um .. savory? 

MARTHA pauses. The table is silent.

EDITOR 3:  And ... roasted?

MARTHA looks at EDITOR 3. As they lock eyes, the faintest hint of a smile crosses MARTHA's face.

MARTHA: Roasted rhubarb. Okay then. Well, I'm glad someone showed up with an actual idea. Now. Who's next?

 

At least that's how it went in our heads. (We totally know how magazines work.)

Point being, savory roasted rhubarb is a fresh take on a spring staple, and we we eager to try it out for ourselves.

Saffron Roasted Cauliflower

Food Nework Magazine (May 2014) 

Oh, saffron. 

As this month's Food Network Magazine says, you're "the diva of the spice cabinet." You're an absolute powerhouse, yet you're extremely delicate and must be handled with care. You're wildly expensive and extraordinarily memorable. 

And yet, like meeting a diva face to face, we never know quite what to do with you.

When we do cook with saffron, we really want it to be something special. Something to really show off the pricey spice.

This Saffron Roasted Cauliflower is a great way to do that.

72 Hours in Lexington, Kentucky

Do you have places where you feel like your heart lives? Where just the thought of a place floods you not only with great memories, but also a yearning just to be there?

For Clay, that place is Lexington, a city of 300,000 in central Kentucky, the heart of Bluegrass country. Clay went to college there, and because several of his friends are still Lexington residents, we've visited nearly once a year for almost a decade.

We were itching for a spring outing to Kentucky, so we recruited Drew and Ralph to join us for a long weekend. On tap? Horse racing. Bourbon. Biscuits. And beautiful spring weather.

If you follow us on Instagram, you might have caught little snippets of our weekend away.

Here's a rundown of where we ate, what we saw, and where we ate some more. 

 

FRIDAY

Biscuits and gravy at Windy Corner Market

We started with biscuits, because obviously. Ouita Michel is a Kentucky-based chef with a small empire of restaurants around Lexington. We hit three of them on this visit (stomachs willing, we would have hit more), starting with Windy Corner Market, a country diner just outside of Lexington. We literally drove straight there from the airport!

We feasted: breakfast burritos, a breakast po' boy, biscuits and gravy. It was all delicious, but the biscuits and gravy blew us away.