The Bitten Word

Thanksgiving 2010: Wild Rice Dressing with Dried Fruits and Nuts

Cook's Country (November 2010)

If you'd served a Wild Rice Dressing at either of our houses growing up, you'd likely be booed out of the room. Rice? Dressing? At Thanksgiving?

So it was with some trepidation -- and with expectations very much in check -- that we approached this recipe for Wild Rice Dressing.  

What we found shocked us. 

Thanksgiving 2010: What the Food Magazines Are Recommending

A Bitten Word Round-Up of 175 Recipes from 10 Leading Food Magazines

As we said yesterday, we've got tons of great Thanksgiving dishes to share with you. But before we get to our Thanksgiving parade of recipes, we wanted to post our annual round-up of all the T-Day recipes from all the food magazines we receive.

Last year, we said that if we were to assign a trend to the 2009 Thanksgiving issues, it would be about simplicity.  

This year, that trend seems even more extreme. This year's food mags are all trumpeting "simple," "easy," "foolproof," "no-time," "Thanksgiving 101" recipes.

Still, we did find a handful of really innovative dishes -- notably, in Food & Wine's "East by Northeast" Thanksgiving spread, which features an Asian-American meal that incorporates Eastern flavors and traditional Thanksgiving dishes. We also lusted after Martha Stewart Living's "Land of Plenty" feature, which showcased a farm-to-table Thanksgiving dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. It's the Thanksgiving we most wanted to attend (maybe because it started off with Hudson Baby Bourbon Whiskey?).

We noticed a few micro-trends this year, too. Despite the beautiful slices of pie that adorn the cover of Martha Stewart Living, it's cakes that seem really popular this year. And especially pumpkin layer cakes -- three different magazines feature one this year.

Other ingredients that are big this year? Pomegranates are everywhere. As is fennel. Both of those are nice ways to add a new flavor into standard Thanksgiving dishes.

What's out? Corn, believe it or not. Other than cornbread stuffings and a couple of soups from Saveur, there's only one dish in all these food magazines that includes corn (Food & Wine's Creamed Haricot Vert and Corn Casserole).

Which ingredients stood out the most this year? Using Wordle.net, we created a couple of interesting word clouds that display the different ingredients in all these recipes according to how often they appear.

Here's a word cloud showing every prominent ingredient:

And here's one where we omitted all the usual suspects (turkey, stuffing, etc.):

Anyway, onto the master index!

Swedish Pancakes

Cook's Country (October 2010)

You know how, whenever you go to IKEA, there's always one thing that you get home with and think, "Hunh. Wait, why did we buy this, again?" And then it sits at your house for two years until you either throw it away or find some use for it.

Maybe it's a 100-pack of votive candles. Or an amorphous orange ceramic serving dish. Or, hey, maybe even a bookcase.

In our case, it was lingonberry jam.

We bought it earlier this year with the good intentions of throwing an Austrian-themed dinner inspired by a January 2010 Bon Appétit feature. Honestly, we just never got around to doing it. (In some alternate universe, we held that dinner party and become huge fans of Liptauer. And we're probably wearing lederhosen.)

Anyway, there was the lingonberry jam, staring us in the face every time we opened the pantry, taunting us.

Finally, we decided to do something about it. So we made these Swedish Pancakes.

Eggplant Parmesan For Two

Cook's Country (August/September 2010)

We struggle with eggplant. It's not that we don't like it, but this time of year, when we're getting five-plus pounds of it a week from our CSA, we have trouble finding ways to use it. (How much baba ganoush can two guys handle?!)

Of course, there's always eggplant Parmesan, but we've never really loved that dish. The eggplant parms we're used to are gloppy, mushy casseroles. Surely there's a better way to use up eggplant?

Well, with only one bite of this reinvention of the classic Italian dish, we were already thinking differently about eggplant parm.

Kansas City Barbecued Brisket

Cook's Country (July 2010)

This time of year, when the air is thick and muggy, and the temperatures inch sickeningly close to triple digits, we don't normally think about brisket. Slow-roasting a hunk of meat for hours in a hot oven? It just seems more like a cold-weather meal to us.

But this Kansas City Barbecued Brisket has shown us the error of our ways! It's sweet, smoky and melt-in-your-mouth tender. And it's perfect for summer, thanks in part to one super-smart innovation: Cooking it for half of the time on the grill.

Spice-Crusted Grilled Pork Tenderloin

Cook's Country (July 2010)

We were instantly skeptical when we spotted this recipe in Cook's Country. The photo of their finished pork (which you can see below) has an amazing crust on it.  The spices are clinging to the meat for dear life, as if they've been fused together by some magical force. 

Surely, we thought, this image has been altered. We were certain that if we made this at home, the spice crust would fall off while on the grill, leaving our poor tenderloin exposed.

Turns out we were terribly, terribly wrong. Leave it up to the geniuses at America's Test Kitchen to come up with a way to fuse spices to meat so that it comes off the grill perfectly seasoned, with a beautiful crust.

Baked Apple Dumplings with Cider Sauce

Cook's Country (November 2009)

Thumbing through the most recent Cook's Country, we stopped dead in our tracks at the site of these Baked Apple Dumplings.  

Pieces of apple, enveloped in flaky dough, dusted in sugar and set in a pool of sweet cider sauce?  Adorable and mouth-watering.

They looked so old-fashioned, like something your great-grandmother would make to top off Sunday lunch. 

So we made them the first chance we got.