The Bitten Word

In Praise of Milquetoast: Cucumber Salad

Cooking Light (June 2013)

Cucumber salads come in a number of forms.

There's the incredibly bracing sort, so tart from vinegar and acid that your face puckers a bit. 

There's the cucumber salad that pits bracing against sweet in an epic battle to see if it will first pucker your face or rot your teeth (kind of our favorite, if we're choosing). 

And there's the bland, the watery, the "is there any dressing on this or did you just serve me a bowl of sliced cucumbers?" salad. 

We picked up a bunch of cucumbers at the farmers market recently, and while trying to figure out what to do with them, we ran across this recipe in Cooking Light. We've never featured a cucumber salad here on the blog, so we gave it a shot. There's nothing out of the ordinary about this recipe: sliced cucumbers and green and red peppers get tossed with oil, white wine, lemon juice, sugar, salt and pepper, as well as some herbs. It's a pretty basic take on the dish. 

But here's the thing about this cucumber salad -- we find it to be perfectly balanced. It's not too sweet, not too tart. The dressing doesn't overpower the vegetables. There's no secret, star ingredient smuggled into the mix to set your taste buds on fire. It's a standard, very good, absolutely ordinary cucumber salad. And we loved it for that.

Chilled Fennel and Cucumber Soup

Fine Cooking (June/July 2013)

Chilled soups are a rite of summer. Or at least a rite of summer issues of food magazines. They show up every June, just as predictable as daylilies.  

We're fans. We love the idea of a cold soup as a refreshing way to start a summer meal.

The problem is flavor. Served piping hot, soups are a swirl of heady flavors -- aromas of vegetables, meat and spices rising seductively from the bowl. But cold soups have a, well, chilling effect on flavor. It's just harder to pack flavor into a cold bowl of soup.

Could this Chilled Fennel and Cucumber Soup from Fine Cooking pass the flavor test?

Strawberry, Almond and Pea Salad

Bon Appétit (June 2013)

We spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about vinaigrettes.

Because we have so many salad greens at our disposal right now, from the garden and our CSA, almost every night we do the vinaigrette hokey-pokey: you put a little of this in a jar, a little of that in a jar, and then you shake it all about.

Our basic vinaigrette tip: Use a basic ratio of 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar. If it doesn't taste good, just keep adding ingredients until it does. Eventually, you'll get there (or you'll need to find a bigger jar). 

With vinaigrette on the brain, we were very pleased with the one on this Strawberry, Almond and Pea Salad. It's a simple mix of white wine vinegar, whole grain mustard, poppy seeds, sugar and vegetable oil. It's unlike our typical vinaigrettes, which are darker and heavier. It's really a simple, sweet poppy seed dressing. (Normally, we're not huge poppy seed dressing fans. The store-bought varieties can tend to be off-puttingly sweet. But we adored this one. Perhaps because it's paired with such amazing flavors.)

 

Tip: An Easy Way to Hull Strawberries

We're suckers for a great kitchen tip. And any time we find one that we love, we want to pass it on to you. 

That happened this week while reading Fine Cooking. 

It's partly about hulling strawberries, and partly about the secret superpowers of tools that are no doubt already in your kitchen. 

First, strawberries: We're swimming in strawberries right now. They've been in our CSA share, and we've been buying a few quarts a week from the farmers market. Mostly we've just been snacking on them, a few here, a few there -- we're loving them. 

When we cut up strawberries, we're guilty of not actually hulling them and instead just taking a knife and capping the end. It's easy, but it also wastes a bit of fruit. The upside of hulling a strawberry is that you remove the cap and the white part undearneath, but the rest remains intact. 

The work of hulling strawberries can be done with a knife (if you're more patient than we are), or any manner of device that you can order online (a quick search on Amazon shows more than a dozen types of strawberry hullers you can buy).

We need a special strawberry huller about as much as we need an olive pitter or a pineapple slicer. (Read: Not at all.)

But Fine Cooking taught us a new trick.

Spiced Salmon Kebabs

Bon Appétit (June 2013)

So, to be honest, we don't really "get" kebabs.

We never really have. To us, it seems like an awful lot of work to cut everything and carefully thread it on a skewer, only to have to take it all off the skewer before you can eat it. And while we like the idea of flavor combinations you can create on a kebab -- say, lamb and cherry tomatoes and mint and zucchini -- it's not as if the flavors actually meld or combine while on the skewer. They're just...adjacent.

Personally, we're much more inclined to just throw everything in a grill basket and sear it that way.

Still, we zeroed in on these kebabs the moment we saw them in the June Bon Appétit. They look so fresh and light and summery.

We decided to set aside our prejudices and get to kebabbin'.

Garden Update: Greens for Days

Tinkering in Our Backyard Garden

We've been away from home a lot over the last three weeks, between an adventure way down South, a trip to Kentucky for a friend's wedding, and work trips for each of us. 

With so little use, our kitchen must be feeling abandoned. Goodness knows we're ready to get back to it. 

While we've been away, and despite our neglect, our little backyard garden has been chugging along, getting a bit bigger every day. 

The squash, as you can see above, are blossoming (unfortunately we haven't been able to use the blossoms yet). Lots of big blossoms, but no actual squash just yet. We've been watching to see if they're male or female blossoms, and if we may need to pollinate the squash by hand, but so far all our blossoms are males. We will get some female blossoms, right? 

 

Creamy Onion Puree: A Reliable Stand-in For Mashed Potatoes?

Southern Living (May 2013)

Truth be told, it's probably been years since we had mashed potatoes.

Not only are they on the unhealthy, carb-heavy end of the spectrum, we just don't like them that much. Oh sure, we like butter, salt and gravy just as much as the next guys. But the actual potatoes? Eh.

So when we saw this recipe in Southern Living, we were intrigued -- and skeptical. Could an onion puree really be an improvement on mashed potatoes?

At first, we assumed this was meant as a healthier alternative to potatoes, but that isn't the intention here. The puree has plenty of fat to give it flavor -- there's three tablespoons of butter and one tablespoon of olive oil. Thyme is also in the mix for additional flavor.

Turns out, it takes a whole lot of onions to get four small servings of Onion Puree. The recipe calls for six large onions. Slicing them, we thought that surely this would make a huge bowl of pureed onions. But then they cook down and down and down, into a relatively small side dish. 

But a side dish we loved. The finished dish is buttery and delicious, with a wonderful, rich flavor that's so much deeper and more interesting than plain ol' mashed potatoes. Since sweet onions are used, the onion flavor is not overpowering. In fact it's very smooth, balanced by the herbs and fat. 

Want to mix up your mashed potato routine?

Ditch the taters and reach for the onions. 

Eating Puerto Rico

"I think I may have to go to Puerto Rico for work." 

"Well, you're not going without me." 

As we mentioned last week, Zach recently had a work assignment for his magazine, and Clay was in need of a few days of downtime. And so we wound up spending five days in Puerto Rico; we returned a little more than a week ago. 

Have you been to Puerto Rico? We hadn't, and we had very little idea what to expect. Typically, we plan out our trips fairly well -- What's the best breakfast place near our hotel? Which museums are free on what days? But this time, thanks to both of us being very busy right up until we got on the plane, we pretty much just showed up. 

And in no time at all, we started to love San Juan.

A Little Teaser of Things to Come

This was our view last week. 

Zach went on assignment for the magazine where he works, and Clay tagged along. Needless to say, from the pic above, you can see it wasn't exactly a hardship. 

We had planned to tell you all about it today -- we ate some really amazing food and it's a trip we highly recommend. But now we're both on the road again for work and a friend's wedding. So we're leaving you with this teaser pic with the promise of more as soon as we're home. 

'Til then, we hope you have an amazing weekend. 

~ Zach & Clay 

Dark-Chocolate Cremoso with Cornflakes and Fresh Fruit

Food & Wine (May 2013)

We make mistakes in the kitchen.  

Often. 

And this post -- Dark-Chocolate Cremoso with Cornflakes and Fresh Fruit -- is a good illustration of that. 

Here's what happened.