The Bitten Word

Thanksgiving 2012 Recipe Index: What the Food Magazines Are Recommending

Now that you're all set on the Thanksgiving trends for 2012, it's time to start planning your menu in earnest. 

As we've done for the past few years, we've gathered all the different Thanksgiving recipes from several different food magazines. This year's index features a full 239 recipes from 11 food magazines: Bon Appetit, Cook's Illustrated, Cooking Light, Everyday Food, Fine Cooking, Food & Wine, Food Network Magazine, Martha Stewart Living, Saveur, Southern Living and Whole Living. And believe us, they are absolutely packed with great ideas for Thanksgiving. 

We hosted our annual Fakesgiving this past Sunday. As you might remember, that's our yearly meal where we invite a bunch of friends to test-drive several Thanksgiving recipes. This year we had 20 friends and family to sample 19 different dishes, from a pre-dinner snack all the way through to dessert. We'll be posting about the dishes we tried over the next three weeks, in the run-up to Turkey Day.

So dig into our Thanksgiving 2012 Recipe Index! But first, we'll share a few photos from our Fakesgiving meal.

2012 Thanksgiving Trends: What's In and What's Out at the Thanksgiving Table This Year

 
It's 22 days till Thanksgiving. Do you know where your turkey is?

We're only half-joking. Yes, there are three weeks to Thanksgiving, with plenty of time to pull it all together. But if you're hosting a Thanksgiving meal this year, it's also time to start planning. 

We try to avoid getting caught up in food hype, but we can't help ourselves at Thanksgiving. We pore through the magazines. We try out a bunch of the dishes. We invite friends over for Fakesgiving (more on this year's event tomorrow). 

And each year, we're enamored with the Thanksgiving trends that we see across the spectrum of food magazines we receive. This year, we've closely studied 11 of those magazines, charting their Turkey Day recommendations. As we have in previous years, tomorrow we'll be publishing the 2012 Thanksgiving Index -- a round-up of all the dishes recommended this year by all 11 of those magazines.

But first, here's what we're seeing in this year's trends.

Wrapping up The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Project

The inaugural Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Project is complete! 

More than 300 of you -- from all over the world! -- joined up to cook nearly every single recipe in six different October 2012 food magazines. We have absolutely loved reading about your adventures and seeing how the dishes turned out. We enjoyed hearing your stories and your thoughts on the recipes, and to see the photos of the finished products. 

Though it was a lot of work, we've had a lot of fun with this project, and we'll definitely do it again in the future, in this form or another. But for now, here are all six teams' write-ups. Explore their posts and get inspired!

(As for us, we'll be turning our attention to the Super Bowl of home-cooking -- Thanksgiving -- starting tomorrow. Don't miss it!)

Huge thanks to everyone who participated and to those who have been following along!

• Team Saveur
• Team Everyday Food
• Team Bon Appetit
• Team Food & Wine
• Team Martha Stewart Living
• Team Food Network Magazine

Enjoy!

-- Zach & Clay

Sugar Roasted Peaches

Fine Cooking (August/September 2012)

Fresh peach season is one of our absolute favorite times of year at the farmers market. But it's September now, which means fresh peaches are quickly dwindling from produce stands.

Depending on where you live, though, you might still be able to find a few stragglers from your favorite peach farmer. 

And you know what that means: Ruuuuuuuun!!! 

Grilled Salmon with Walnut-Arugula Pesto

Fine Cooking (June/July 2012)

New spins on pesto -- those that do not rely on the classic combination of basil, pine nuts, cheese and olive oil -- are a staple of food magazines. Almost every month during the spring or summer, at least one magazine is featuring a new kind of pesto that can be served with pasta, meat or chicken.

Some are all about non-pine nut pestos, one of which we've made before (an excellent pesto with walnuts). Others ditch basil for spinach, kale, parsley or other green herbs or vegetables. 

We're always smitten with the idea of these non-basil pestos, but we've rarely tried making them. The one time we have made a new take on pesto -- a brocolli pesto earlier this year-- it turned out, well, not so hot. (Our post on that includes a number of suggestions for improving it, if you want to give it a go.) 

But a recent excess of arugula had us hunting for a way to use it that didn't involve salad. After flipping through a stack of food magazines, we landed at this Grilled Salmon with Walnut-Arugula Pesto. 

Quinoa Salad with Asparagus, Edamame and Radish

adapted from Fine Cooking (June 2012)

Our friend Jim just graduated from business school, and we invited him over for a celebratory dinner. Nothing fancy -- just a few friends for backyard cocktails and some food on the grill. (We did do one little thing to make it special. We made Jim's self-proclaimed all-time favorite cake.)

The biggest rule for the dinner? No indoor cooking. It was a steamy Saturday, and we didn't want to turn our apartment into a hotbox.

So we were very pleased to come across the feature in the June Fine Cooking on grain salads. The mag proclaims them "the new summer side," and we couldn't agree more.

Malaysian Beef Rendang

Fine Cooking (April 2012)

"Kami bekerja sepanjang hari di depan dapur yang panas," everyone!

That's Malaysian for, "We slaved all day in front of a hot stove." It's a handy phrase to know in case you decide to make this Malaysian Beef Rendang.

We kid, we kid! Well, sort of.

But if you do make this, there's another Malaysian word you should learn: "lazat."

And that means "delicious."

Radicchio and Cauliflower Salad with Toasted Breadcrumbs

Fine Cooking (December 2011/January 2012) 

January is a cruel month for salads. Just when you're trying to eat better and more healthfully, good lettuce becomes hardest to find. The rest of the produce can be wan and unexciting, and you valiantly abstain from all the good stuff ("Oh, no blue cheese for me, thanks!", "Could I get that dressing on the side?").  

Every bite of a January salad can feel like choking down a resolution.

But there's good news.

This Radicchio and Cauliflower Salad with Toasted Breadcrumbs is a welcome break from the sad iceberg lettuce of January. It's just the sort of New Year's salad we can get behind.

Thanksgiving 2011: Roasted Squash and Polenta Torta with Red Onion Marmalade

Fine Cooking (October/November 2011)

Here's just about everything you need to know about this Polenta Torta, in a series of five photographs. 

Thanksgiving 2011: Cranberry-Lime Shrub Sparkler

Fine Cooking (October/November 2011)

A couple months ago, we were reading about colonial-era drink recipes. (Yes, we were just doing it for fun.)

Anyway, we came across something called a "shrub," an 18th-century American drink made with sweetened fruit and vinegar (not to be confused with a "switchel," another excellently-named vinegar-infused drink from the same time period). 

We were more than a little intrigued. Vinegar? In a cocktail? 

When we opened the Thanksgiving issue of Fine Cooking and saw a recipe for a Cranberry-Lime Shrub, we immediately added it to our Fakesgiving menu. We wanted to offer our dinner guests something special as they arrived, something fun to sip on while we finished prepping the meal.