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

Food Network Magazine Cover-To-Cover: All the Recipes in the October 2012 Issue

Part 6 of The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Project

As you may have heard, we had a little bit of wind and rain in D.C. over the past couple days. We took the opportunity to hunker down and finish pulling together the final installment of the Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Project. And we're going out with a bang! 

Team Food Network tackled the November issue of the magazine with gusto, stewing gumbos, whipping up cakes, improvising fondant (Starburst? Genius!) and trying all manner of new (to them) techniques and recipes. Give them a read and leave a comment with your thoughts!

And without further ado, here's Team Food Network!

 

APPETIZERS AND SNACKS | SOUPS AND STEWS | SANDWICHES | PASTAS AND GRAINS | MEAT, POULTRY AND EGGS | FISH AND SEAFOOD | VEGETABLES AND SIDES | DESSERTS | DRINKS

Grilled Ginger-Beer Chicken

Food Network Magazine (May 2012)

We always have ginger beer on hand for summer cocktails. Also winter ones. (We drink a lot of cocktails with ginger beer, is what we're saying.)

But we'd never really thought about cooking with ginger beer. Which is why we really wanted to make this Grilled Ginger-Beer Chicken. 

Chicken rubbed with dry ginger and slathered in a ginger-beer-and-black-tea barbecue sauce? It sounds like a great twist on BBQ chicken!

As it turns out: Great? Yes. A twist? Well, not so much...

Asparagus and Cheese Tart

Food Network Magazine (April 2012)

Sometimes when you're cooking dinner for guests, you just need to roll with the punches. Usually, that works out A-OK. Happy guests. Clean plates. Satisfied hosts.

Sometimes, not so much. 

Zach's parents recently stayed with us for a few days. Since they've visited our nation's capitol many times at this point, we no longer plan their visits around museums or memorials. Now, it's all about where we can go that's a bit offbeat. (Roosevelt Island and Lincoln Cottage made this visit's list.)

Most important, it's about where we eat. This time around, we had Thai, Vietnamese, Scandinavian and pie. (Cue music: "One of these things is not like the others....")

And, as always when we're with Zach's mom, we cook. Such were our plans for a recent Saturday night when, after a marathon of eating meals out at restaurants, we all needed a night in. So we planned to cook a spring meal, with this Asparagus and Cheese Tart featured as the entree. 

Thanksgiving 2011: Green Bean Casserole With Crispy Shallots

Food Network Magazine (November 2011)

Most of the green bean casseroles we've encountered (99 percent of which have been at Southern potlucks) have been some variation of this:

Combine two cans green beans with one can cream of mushroom soup and a splash of milk in a casserole dish. Top it with canned fried onions. Bake it for an extended period in a casserole dish.

And you know what? It tastes pretty good.

Oh, it doesn't taste at all like actual green beans. And the beans themselves are usually overcooked to the point that they're soggy, stringy and unrecognizable. Still, it's a fine enough casserole.

That casserole? It's like the country cousin to this Green Bean Casserole with Crispy Shallots.

It's as if the classic green bean casserole got a new haircut, started working out, and high-tailed it to the city where it lives in a nice little apartment, happily ever after.

So what sets this casserole apart? 

Thanksgiving 2011 Recipe Index: What the Food Magazines Are Recommending

Our Fakesgiving + Our Favorite Holiday Dishes

A little more than a week ago, we had Thanksgiving.

Or really, we had Fakesgiving, our annual tradition with friends and family where we pack as many seats as possible into our apartment, make a bunch of new dishes from November food magazines, and see what everyone likes and dislikes. This year, there were 13 of us. Zach's mom and sister came and helped cook the day before (we literally could not have done it without them), and we made 17 new Thanksgiving dishes. 

(This year's Fakesgiving crowd, minus the two of us.)

Below, you'll see the initial list of recipes we started with: more than 250 Thanksgiving recipes from 10 magazines. To be included in the index, the recipes had to be part of the magazine's Thanksgiving coverage. So this is not meant to be comprehensive -- there are many more recipes in this month's magazines. If the recipe is hyperlinked, it is available online. If not, it's not there yet. 

In preparation for this year's Thanksgiving coverage, we've also created a page of Our Favorite Holiday Recipes. There, you'll find a collection of dishes from Thanksgivings, Fakesgivings and holiday dinner parties past. We'll be updating it as we introduce new content and recipes on the site.

Enjoy the index! 

Thanksgiving 2011 Trends in Food Magazines: Pies, Pecans, Ginger and Green Beans

Thanksgiving is coming! Thanksgiving is coming!

And we're ready. We've scoured the magazines, tested recipes, and we're eager talk turkey, recommend dishes, and answer any Thanksgiving-related questions you might have.

We're kicking off our Thanksgiving coverage by looking at the trends in this year's crop of magazines. As in previous years, we've indexed every single one of the November Thanksgiving recipes from the magazines in our rotation. We'll share that list with you on Monday. There are some really exciting (and bizarre) dishes among the more than 250 recipes.

But today we're going to talk about trends. 

As we pored through this year's Thanksgiving features, some clear trends emerged. To illustrate many of the trends in this year's T-Day recipes, we created word clouds, like the one above, which illustrate how frequently certain words popped up. You can click on all the word clouds to enlarge them, so you can take a closer look. 

What's the general theme for this year? Well, for a lot of our magazines, the theme seemed to be, "Thanksgiving 2011: We're Just Not That Into You." Food & Wine and Saveur seem rather light on their coverage. Even Martha Stewart Living, which we would sort of hold up as the grande dame of Thanksgiving entertaining, seemed scaled back. (We hasten to add that we're not saying that's a bad thing -- Lord knows there are plenty of great autumn recipes out there that don't involve sweet potatoes or cranberry sauce.)

But there was one magazine that blew us away this year. You guys know we tend not to single out particular magazines or issues as favorites, but this must be said: Bon Appétit BROUGHT IT this Thanksgiving. Buh-ROUGHT. IT. From its "Feast from the East" feature, which showcased marvelous ideas for an Asian-inspired Thanksgiving, to the "Down South" feature on a Louisiana Cajun Thanksgiving feast, we were enthralled. Four turkeys, a host of awesome side dishes, and drool-worthy desserts (we need that Grape-and-Apple Pie) -- the November 2011 Bon Appétit is a pleasure. Even if you're set on your Thanksgiving menu, consider picking up a copy just for fun.

Anyway, trends.

As you can see from the word cloud above, the usual suspects are, well, the usual suspects. So here's a word cloud showing all the recipe words, minus "turkey," "gravy," "cranberry," "stuffing," "potatoes," "dressing" and "roasted" (a.k.a. the saddest Thanksgiving ever):

Peppery Punch

Food Network Magazine (July/August 2011)

Last Monday, Drew and Ralph came over for dinner and we served this punch. More on that in a moment.

Since then, we've had a whirlwind week. Here are a few things that happened:

• Wednesday night, we boarded a plane to Portland, Maine, where we rendezvoused with Zach's family for a 70/30 trip (his stepfather was turning 70; his sister, 30).

• We spent one night in Portland, where we ate at Fore Street, which we think is just about the coziest, most romantic restaurant we've ever visited. It has an extensive, seasonal menu, a big, open kitchen and it's housed inside a really cool old building. We had some amazing mussels, an excellent steak and a to-die-for pork chop.

• Thursday, we headed to the seaside town of Camden for a few nights of what became a blur of lobster and naps.

• Clay read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (which is excellent); Zach's been slugging through Cloud Atlas (which is fascinating).

• We met up with our friends Dan and Wendy for a sail on Penobscot Bay.

• Also with Dan and Wendy, we went to a field day out in the tiny village of Montville, where we witnessed a 90-plus-year-old woman compete in a cross-cut saw competition. It was one of the highlights of the trip. 

• Some of our party hiked Mount Battie in Camden, but the two of us couldn't be pulled away from the back deck of the house where we were staying.

• We had the chance to revisit one of our all-time favorite restaurants, Chase's Daily in Belfast, Maine. Nestled on the gallery-crammed streets of Belfast, it's a vegetarian restaurant that's only open for dinner on Friday nights. We ordered a bean salad (with amazing toasted almonds) and cacio e pepe to start. For entrees, we had a lasagna that included beets and a pizza topped with braised fennel and figs (delicious!). 

• We played some fierce games of Scrabble with Zach's mom B.

• Lots and lots of naps.

• And, as mentioned, there were many, many lobster rolls. We think our favorite of the weekend might be the one from J's Oyster in Portland. (If you go, get the Bloody Mary. It's one of the Top 3 we've ever had.) 

The one thing we didn't get around to was making this punch a second time. We had planned to, and we're sure Zach's family would have loved it. But we would have needed to go find elderflower liqueur, plus some champagne, and that, honestly, seemed like a bit of a chore on vacation. So we opted for simpler cocktails instead.

Still, this Peppery Punch is a fantastic summer drink to have up your sleeve.