The Bitten Word

Charred Broccoli and Red Onion Salad

Food & Wine (June 2014)

Pound for pound, we probably eat more broccoli than any other vegetable.

Sure, we're indulging in the great summer produce that's (finally!) showing up -- lush greens, beans, squash. But year-round, broccoli is our go-to. It's tasty, it's packed with fiber and nutrients, and it's easy to prepare and pack for work lunches.

We typically make broccoli one of two ways. Either we'll roast it in the oven tossed with a little olive oil and a sprinkle of salt and red pepper flakes. Or we'll steam it, either on the stovetop or in the microwave. We'll make a big batch at one time, giving us enough broccoli for a few meals.

So we're always on the lookout for good broccoli ideas, which is why we wanted to try this Charred Broccoli and Red Onion Salad.

Summer Reading: Let's Make a List

Thanks to a recent trip to the beach, along with some other travel here and there, we've knocked out a number of books already this summer. A few of them we've really loved, so we thought we'd share our reading list with you. 

But here's the thing: We need some new recommendations! And we're sure a few other Bittens do, too.

Will you take a look through our list, and tell us what you think we should read next? 

A Few Recent Books That We Loved

The Vacationers. Emma Straub's novel is getting a lot of attention as a good summer read, and it's easy to see why. The book follows a family on a fraught summer vacation to Majorca, with funny and also touching consequences. It's a perfect book to make you forget about everyday life. (And it's the first book we've read in a while that we wished was twice as long. So many good characters!)

Meg Wolitzer's The Position. This isn't a new book (it came out eight years ago), but we loved The Interestings so much that we decided to sample Wolitzer's earlier work. The Position introduces us to the Mellows, a couple who in the 1970s publish a how-to book about maintaining a healthy sexual relationship. The book then explores how that decision affects them and their four children over the ensuing decades. You need to meet the Mellows. 

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett. Clay loves Patchett's fiction and highly recommends this collection of non-fiction essays in which the author writes about everything from learning to be a writer, to owning an independent bookstore to, as the title implies, a dissection of her own marriage. Much of the material is previously published but was new to us. 

Grilled Ginger-Glazed Chicken Livers with Spicy Plum Sauce

Cooking Light (June 2014)

 

Summer's here! Time to fire up the grill for burgers, brats ... and ginger-glazed chicken livers?

Sometimes we're drawn to a particular recipe specifically because it's unexpected, and because it pulls us out of our comfort zone. And the idea of grilled chicken livers with a fresh-made plum sauce was so surprising, so unexpected and -- okay, we'll say it -- so weird that we just had to try it.

Dinner with Margie | Semolina, Coconut & Marmalade Cake from Jerusalem

Recipe from Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Ottolenghi and Tamimi

 

When's the last time you had dinner with a stranger?

An unexpected thing that this blog has brought into our lives is that we've met so many people not just online, but also in the flesh. Randomly, readers have said hi at the grocery store, at a Broadway play, even at Alcatraz (!). And we've met up with some readers who have come through D.C., like Valerie, who we'd traded emails with for years but just met in person for the first time when we had dinner earlier this year.

And then of course there's Margie, who won our blogiversary giveaway. We felt like we already knew her from corresponding via email, but then again, it's not like we'd ever laid eyes on her. And we definitely knew nothing about her dinner companions. But we didn't really think twice about it. We find that dinner with someone you hardly know can be just as fun as dinner with close friends.

And this dinner was great. We don't mean the food (though we thought it was very good -- thank you, Ottolenghi & Tamimi). Dinner was great because of meeting Margie and her gang, hearing about what she's cooking, their adventures in raising chickens, and comparing notes on recipes. It was easy and funny and a great night. 

Every good dinner party needs a good ending. We found ours in these Semolina, Coconut & Marmalade Cakes from Jerusalem. 

Dinner with Margie | Ottolenghi's Chickpea Sauté with Greek Yogurt

Recipe from Plenty: A Cookbook by Ottolenghi and Tamimi
  

Some dishes can skate by on looks alone. 

C'mon, take a close look at this Chickpea Sauté, with its vibrant rainbow of Swiss chard and carrots, studded with chickpeas and topped with yogurt and olive oil. It's a stunner, and one of the most colorful dishes we've made in a long time. 

But before we get to that, in some ways, this was the Ottolenghi dish we were least excited about for our dinner with Margie. We had a tart, beautiful beans and an excellent salad, but felt that we needed a fourth dish to round out the main course.  

Like shoppers lured in by something shiny in the window, we saw this rainbow of colors in Plenty and that was all we needed. Even if it wasn't great, at least it would be pretty. 

Dinner with Margie | Ottolenghi's Green Bean Salad with Mustard Seeds and Tarragon

Recipe from Plenty: A Cookbook by Ottolenghi and Tamimi

We all know the old-school way of building a menu: Pick a protein. Choose a vegetable that you like. Prepare a starch. Maybe throw in a salad if you're feeling crazy.

And often, we're old-school. On a typical weeknight, we eat meals consisting of a protein, a salad and a vegetable. It's boring but functional. 

But when we're having people over for dinner, we try to break out of that box. And writing this blog is the perfect excuse to do that. It's freeing, in a way, to have a food blog, because any choices you make in what to serve guests, no matter how bizarre, are easily brushed away with, "We thought we'd try this for the blog." So when friends come over, they know there are no sure things since we hardly ever serve something we've made before. 

We like to think of building menus the way one might build a band. Yes, you need your Pauls and your Johns, but you need some Ringos and Georges, too. Not every dish can stand on its own and outshine the others. You need -- and you want -- to have strong supporting players that still offer great flavor but don't try too hard to be the Best. Dish. Ever. Plus, as a cook, you need to save your own sanity. We would never succeed in throwing a dinner party if we served five complicated, showstopping dishes (or rather, we might survive, but our marriage might not). 

For our dinner with Margie, we knew we already had a showstopping dish before even tasting it, in the Very Full Tart with Roasted Vegetables. It was going to skate by on looks alone. 

But we needed a Ringo -- something simple but talented.

With this Green Bean Salad with Mustard Seeds and Tarragon, we found our Ringo. 

 

Dinner with Margie | Ottolenghi's 'Very Full Tart' from Plenty

Recipe from Plenty: A Cookbook by Ottolenghi and Tamimi

As we mentioned earlier this week, when we were planning a menu with our contest winner Margie, we knew that one of the guests was vegetarian. Rather than consign her to having just a salad and some side dishes, we decided to do a fully veggies-only meal.

We love vegetables, but we always fret a little about a vegetarian dinner. How do you keep it from just being a progression of side dishes?  Will it be filling enough?  What's the main course??

This so-called "Very Full Tart," from Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty was our savior.

Dinner with Margie | Na'ama's Fattoush Salad from Jerusalem

Recipe from Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Ottolenghi and Tamimi

Way back in February, to mark the beginning of the seventh year (!) of The Bitten Word, we did a giveaway for dinner for six at our place. It was the best way we could think to mark our blogiversary. Meeting and hearing from so many of you over all these years has truly been the highlight of writing this blog (yes, it does thrill us, still, when you comment). Inviting a reader and his or her friends over for dinner sounded like a ton of fun.

Longtime reader Margie, who lives out in Virginia, won the random drawing for dinner. It took us a few months to get our schedules worked out, but in mid-May Margie came to dinner with three friends in tow.

Congrats, Margie!  

We pitched three dinner ideas to Margie in the weeks leading up to the meal:

• A Thai feast, based on what we learned at a Thai cooking school (we know, we know....we're delinquent in sharing those recipes with you).

• A grilling extravaganza. Warm temperatures had just arrived and we were itching for some food from the grill.

• An all-Ottolenghi meal, featuring recipes from the popular cookbooks Plenty, Jerusalem and Ottolenghi, all by London-based, Israeli-born chef Yotam Ottolenghi and his business partner Sami Tamimi. 

Margie chose Ottolenghi -- which is what we were secretly rooting for. We have previously made one Ottolenghi dish -- Soba Noodles with Eggplant and Mango -- and have been eager for an excuse to make more. Plus, one of the guests coming with Margie was vegetarian, and Ottolenghi is a master of vegetable side dishes and vegetarian mains. 

In the end, we selected five recipes from the books. We're going to share them all over the next week or so, starting with the first course of our dinner with Margie, Na'ama's Fattoush Salad.