The Bitten Word

Cast-Iron Hacks: Classic Roast Chicken with Lemon-Thyme Pan Sauce

Today's post is less about a recipe (goodness knows we've written enough about roast chicken), and more about a simple trick to have you rethinking roast chicken.

America's Test Kitchen has a new book out -- Cook It In Cast Iron -- and we're smitten. It's a simple little book, but for those of you who are cast-iron aficionados, or those wanting to use their cast iron more, it's a must read. The book covers a wide range of dishes -- everything from fried eggs to pies -- that you can easily make in cast iron. 

We decided to feature this recipe because it uses cast iron to hack a common chicken problem: The chicken breast cooks more quickly, and therefore dries out before the thighs are done. This is why so many roast chicken recipes have you flip the bird at different intervals. 

This recipe solves that problem by using cast iron's ability to retain heat. You simply get the pan really hot in the oven, then place the chicken breast side-up, allowing the thighs to cook at a slightly higher temperature. The best part: it works like a charm, producing a flavorful roast chicken in under an hour. 

Time to break out the cast iron!

The Chocolate Cake That Cures Everything

We're sharing this chocolate cake with you today not to cure something, but to celebrate something.

This week marks the beginning of the ninth (ninth!) year of The Bitten Word.

It's our blogiversary, y'all! 

We're celebrating eight full years of The Bitten Word in two ways this week, beginning with chocolate cake. Later in the week, we'll share some reflections on the past eight years. Last year's reflections are a doozy, and this year's are shaping up to be something you won't want to miss. 

But first: cake.

When we heard a historic snowfall was on its way a couple weeks ago, we rushed to the supermarket, not for bread and milk, but for cake ingredients. If we were going to be trapped inside, we were going to be trapped inside with a massive chocolate cake. 

This "Chocolate Cake That Cures Everything" was among the recipes we most wanted to make from Ruth Reichl's My Kitchen Year. She promised that it made a massive cake.

And she wasn't kidding. 

Miso-Glazed Mahi Mahi with Macadamia Nut & Sake Cream Sauce

Aloha!

We may be just back from Spain, but before we dive into all of our Iberian food adventures, we first want to take you someplace else: Hawaii.

We mentioned last month that we took a Hawaiian fish-cooking class this winter, thanks to a gift certificate we had received as a Christmas gift. We never had aspirations to learn Hawaiian dishes, but when we went on the cooking school's website to choose a course, the one sort of jumped out to us. Four fishes dishes, prepared in traditional Hawaiian ways? Why not! So we took the class, loved the food, and then promptly tucked away the recipes with great intentions of later making them at home. But then we got all busy, and then we went away, and our Hawaiian aspirations got put on hold.

Once we got back home this past week, we were eager to see friends, so we invited Drew and Ralph over for dinner to catch up. It was a perfect spring evening -- cool and breezy -- and we planned to have dinner in the back yard.

It seemed like just the right occasion to try out our favorite dish from our Hawaiian cooking class: Miso-Glazed Mahi Mahi with a Macadamia Nut & Sake Cream Sauce.

 

Simple Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

From the cookbook Twelve Recipes

We're avoiding new cookbooks these days like Kimmy Schmidt is avoiding her past.

Mostly we're out of the cookbook game because we're waaaay overdue for a cookbook clean-out. Truly, we are running out of places to put them and our shelves are overflowing, with books starting to accumulate on the floor. [#CookbookProblems]

But when a friend, who is paring down her own cookbook collection, offered us a copy of Twelve Recipes, the new cookbook from Chez Panisse chef Cal Peternell, we readily took it off her hands. Twelve Recipes showed up in a number of food magazines last year, and we were eager to check it out.

It wasn't just the Chez Panisse connection that intrigued us, although we do love Chez Panisse.

It was the concept of this book that had us hooked: When his oldest son is about to go off to college, a chef pulls together the 12 basic recipes that are enough to get anyone started in the kitchen.

The book, of course, has far more than 12 recipes, but it does provide 12 basics and then many variations on those (Pasta with Tomato becomes Summer Marinara, Arrabbiata, Puttanesca, and on and on). 

We read through the book this past weekend, and though there are lots of recipes we wanted to make, we decided to start with a Simple Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting.

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.

 

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.