The Bitten Word

Blueberry-Caramel Skillet Cobbler

Food Network Magazine (July 2015)

A couple weeks ago, we wrote about our disappointing experience with a Skillet Blueberry Cobbler. We loved the idea of a cast-iron fruit cobbler, but the one we made was bland, doughy and decidedly un-special.

Then everything changed.

We went over to our friend Bruce's for a thoughtful book-club discussion of Kate Atkinson's new novel "A God in Ruins." Okay, that's a lie. We went to Bruce's for a curated screening of Ingmar Bergman's four most important films.  Okay fine, that's a lie too. We went to Bruce's to marathon season 1 of "Empire", okay? There, are you happy?

The point is, Bruce had made a special dessert for the occasion: a skillet blueberry cobbler. And it was absolutely fantastic.

It was perfectly sweet, with just the right ratio of fruit and crust. It was heavenly. It was transcendent.

Basically it was everything our first skillet cobbler wasn't.

We had to try it for ourselves, and for you. Because we all need a good blueberry cobbler in our lives, and we found it with this Blueberry-Caramel Skillet Cobbler. 

Orange-Cardamom Roast Chicken

Food Network Magazine (March 2015)

We don't think we've ever mentioned this, but one of our favorite TV guilty pleasures is "Food Network Star," the reality competition where chefs compete to host a cooking show on the Food Network.

Actually, we're not even sure why we think of it as a "guilty pleasure." Sure, like all reality television, it's a somewhat contrived televised competition with silly challenges and outlandish personalities and seemingly arbitrary judging. But no more so than, say, "Survivor." Or, you know, U.S. presidential elections.

So let's just call it a "TV pleasure."

One of the most pleasurable personalities on this TV pleasure was Aarti Sequeira, the winner of Season 6 back in 2010. Her friendly face, sunny disposition and cheery British accent were positively delightful. She completely won us over. We loved her Food Network show, "Aarti Party" (which is just freaking adorable). Now she's got a program on the Cooking Channel.

Aarti's culinary raison d'etre -- her "food P.O.V.," as they'd say on "Food Network Star" -- is to incorporate traditional Indian flavors and ingredients into modern American cooking. That's perfectly exemplified in Aarti's recipe for this Orange-Cardamom Roast Chicken.

Garlic-Herb Spaghetti Squash

Food Network Magazine (February 2015)

Are you eating a lot of spaghetti squash?

No, we mean, like, right now. Are you eating spaghetti squash right this minute?

Because you could be. It's that easy to make.

This recipe from Food Network Magazine shows just how quick and simple it is to prepare a spaghetti squash side dish.

But this recipe, in our opinion, could also use a little tweaking.

Spanish Chorizo, Kale and Cranberry Bean Soup

Food Network Magazine (January 2015)

It's that time of year when we look into our pantry and think, "Who in the world bought all this stuff?" You see, our cupboards right now are a bit like the island of misfit toys. 

There are six kinds of mustard. Three kinds of anchovies. Seven (!) kinds of nuts. And so. much. orzo. Someone needs a Cupboard Cleanout. 

Though we love digging into our cupboard and making a complete meal out of it, we found this week that there are perils to doing that. Sometimes, the stuff in your pantry is just too old.

Case in point? We planned to make this Spanish Chorizo, Kale and Cranberry Bean Soup, a Bobby Flay recipe from the current issue of Food Network Magazine. We thought it sounded delicious, and we were especially happy because it would be a good excuse to use some beans we already had on hand.

We love this soup, but using "vintage" beans was a big mistake.

The 10 Best Food Magazine Recipes We Made in 2014 -- Plus Our 5 Other Favorite Dishes

   

    

   

Happy New Year, Bittens!

We are so excited to start cooking in 2015!  But first let's take a quick look back at 2014.

In our ongoing quest to test-drive food magazine recipes, we tried out a lot of dishes last year. Some were good; some were duds. Here are the best things we made all year long, in chronological order. First up are our favorite food magazine recipes, followed by a few other favorites from last year.

 

The 10 Best Food Magazine Recipes from 2014...

1. Pork and Squash Stew with Chiles 
Tender bites of pork in a savory broth with a warm, comforting heat. It's the perfect dish for winter -- and, as we wrote back in February, an ideal make-ahead dish. 

 

2. Herbed Faux-tisserie Chicken and Potatoes
We have roasted a LOT of chickens in our day. This one is absolutely one of the top three ever.

 

3. New Orleans–Style BBQ Shrimp
Spicy and buttery and delicious. The next-best thing to actually going to New Orleans.

 

4. Edamame-Miso Tuna Salad Sandwiches
This is probably the one dish we've made the most since posting about it last year. The mix of miso, hot chile oil and edamame is a great new spin on tuna salad. We've made this (especially for lunch to take to work) more times than we can count.

 

5. Ayam Jeruk (Grilled Chicken and Toasted Coconut Salad)
We debated whether to include this dish in our year-end roundup, because we'd made so many substitutions in the recipe. But who cares? This dish was to die for, and we're sure it's even better if you can find fresh galangal. And shaved coconut. And candelnuts. And Asian shallots. And Balinese long peppers...

 

6. Asian Marinated Tomatoes 
These tomatoes are really more of an accompaniment or a condiment than a stand-alone dish. But they're marvelous. If we may quote our own post from last summer: "Imagine if a bowl of salsa spent a semester abroad in Thailand, and got really into meditation and mystic Buddhism and lemongrass, and then came home and hopped up on your grilled chicken." Who doesn't want that??

 

7. Spiced Lamb Burgers
Nothing we made last year was as drool-worthy as these lamb burgers. As we said back in July, "The lamb is flavorful and full of wonderful spice from the coriander, cumin and cinnamon. The fat from the lamb melts into the pitas, soaking them with flavor and making them crispy and amazing." If you're not salivating at that, there may be something wrong with you.

 

8. Vietnamese Pork Chops with Pickled Watermelon
In August, we solidly declared this the "DISH. OF. THE. SUMMER."  We stand by that. This salty/savory/sour/sweet/pungent/crispy/juicy dish is everything you want in a grilled entree.

 

9. The Barefoot Contessa's Goat Cheese Mashed Potatoes
It's highly possible that no dish we've featured has ever elicited a greater response than these potatoes that we made for our Fakesgiving test-run of recipes. We heard from countless -- countless! -- friends and family and Bitten Word readers who made these for Thanksgiving. And just about everyone has told us these are the best mashed potatoes they've ever made.  

 

10. Maple Syrup Pie with Crème Fraîche
This delicious pie was the crowd favorite at our Fakesgiving meal this past year. We could eat it morning, noon and night. 

 

... Plus 5 More of Our Faves.

 

Thanksgiving 2014: The Barefoot Contessa's Goat Cheese Mashed Potatoes

Food Network Magazine (November 2014)

Let's hear what some of our friends had to say about these Goat Cheese Mashed Potatoes from The Barefoot Contessa:  

"The only thing wrong with the goat cheese mashed potatoes was that there wasn't five times as much..."

"The Goat Cheese Mashed Potatoes are the benchmark for rich, creamy, salty, savory potatoes. Just perfectly delicious. I want all the Goat Cheese Mashed Potatoes all the time, gout be damned."

"I don't think I will be able to eat regular mashed potatoes again."

"Today I fell in love with those heavenly goat cheese mashed potatoes."

In case it’s not clear, these Goat Cheese Mashed Potatoes were a hit. In fact, this dish, dear Bittens, was far and away everyone’s single favorite thing we served our Fakesgiving.

Let's talk about what makes them so good.

No-Bake Chocolate-Peanut Butter Cookies

Food Network Magazine (September 2014)

Think of this as "The Curious Case of the No-Bake Chocolate-Peanut Butter Cookies."

But first, let's back up: No-Bake Chocolate-Peanut Butter Cookies have a soft spot in our hearts. It's partly due to our love for all things chocolate/peanut butter. The cookies also remind us each of fond memories of childhood. And more recently, it's our association of this kind of cookie with trips to the beach. 

Every Labor Day, we spend that final, blissful weekend of summer in North Carolina, at our friend Drew's family's beach house. We make a long weekend of it (today's actually our last day at the beach). The days are long and lazy. Books are read. Magazines are passed around. The nights are most often filled with home-cooked meals. And, frankly, we eat a lot of stuff that we don't allow ourselves to eat during regular life (see: the multiple bags of spicy Cheetos that have been downed over the past few days). 

For a number of years, it's been a sort of tradition to make No-Bake Chocolate-Peanut Butter Cookies at the beach. Typically, we make any old version of these cookies -- whatever first shows up in Google. This year, when the latest issue of Food Network Magazine had a recipe for these cookies, we rushed to make them. Thanks to a few surprise ingredients -- golden raisins, coconut, flaxseeds -- we were eager to give them a shot.

So here's what happened. 

Spicy Asian Cucumbers

Food Network Magazine (July/August 2014)

"In this episode of Hoarders: Fruit and Vegetable Edition, we meet Zach and Clay, who are part of a farm share that gives them seven to ten pounds of vegetables a week. But also, against all common sense, these gentlemen spend an obscene amount of money buying other vegetables at a weekly farmers market. Not to mention the vegetables they are harvesting from their garden. This is their story....."

It is true.

We are obsessively buying vegetables this summer, somehow treating August like a Vegetable Going Out of Business Sale. Our kitchen counter has plates and bowls full of tomatoes (currently there are at least three varieties). Our fridge is packed with eggplant, zucchini, different squash varieties and ears of corn. And let's not talk about the peaches, nectarines and blueberries. Some days, it looks like we're planning to open a farm stand. 

But -- and we hesitate to write this because we fully expect to return home tonight to find that all those vegetables have simultaneously and spontaneously rotted away -- nothing seems to be going to waste. We are cooking the hell out of some vegetables this summer. 

It helps that we've been having even more of our meals than usual at home. It also helps that we've been obsessively packing our lunches every day for work.

But that takes a ton of planning -- more planning, honestly, than we're always able to pull off. So we're constantly making very simple preparations of vegetables (think sliced tomatoes with torn basil, some oil and vinegar, or a side of raw, thinly sliced, salted cucumbers) or finding super spare recipes from our stack of food magazines. 

These Spicy Asian Cucumbers fit both bills: very simple, few ingredients, excellent payoff. 

Nashville Hot Chicken

Adapted from Saveur (June/July 2014) and Food Network Magazine (June 2014) 

Have you ever heard of Nashville Hot Chicken?

It's a Nashville specialty -- fried chicken that's slathered in a super-hot, spicy glaze. There are a few joints in Nashville that are known for it, including Prince's, Bolton's and relative newcomer Hattie B's. 

It is seriously hot -- the last time we had some on a visit to Tennessee to see Zach's family, we made a beeline from Bolton's straight to Jeni's ice cream to cool down our fiery gullets.

Even if you hadn't heard of Nashville Hot Chicken a couple months ago, odds are -- if you read food magazines -- you know about it now. Why? Because no fewer than four magazines have featured this dish in the past two months (and two of the recipes are from Hattie B's)! There it was in the June issues of Saveur, Bon Appétit, and Food Network Magazine. Then this month, there's a feature on it in Good Housekeeping (not a mag that's in our regular rotation, but we happened to see a copy).

It's gettin' hot in herre! Anybody hungry for some chicken?*
 

 

Clearly, Nashville Hot Chicken is having a moment. (And Hattie B's has an excellent publicist!)

So last week, it had a moment at our house.

Shrimp and Avocado Salad

Food Network Magazine (July/August 2014)

Last year, we spent the Fourth of July in Las Vegas with 10 friends for a bachelor party. The year before, the two of us were on the beach in Provincetown, on Cape Cod.

This year we spent the Fourth at home. It was just what we needed. Between work trips, a vacation and visits to see family, the two of us traveled a heckuva lot this spring and early summer. What we wanted and needed most was some downtime at home.

Our Fourth weekend was fantastic in a gloriously low-key way. The weather was insanely nice -- definitely the most pleasant Fourth either of of us can remember. We walked around town, saw some friends, saw D.C.'s beautiful fireworks show, grilled out a couple times, ate an ice cream sandwich, caught a movie (at a pop-up theater!), kayaked on the Potomac, and went to the pool.

And we made this Shrimp and Avocado Salad.