The Bitten Word

Tomato-Cucumber Gazpacho with Grilled Parmesan Croutons

Bon Appétit (June 2009)

We're absolutely thrilled to be featured in today's Washington Post story about canning.

We loved talking about our experience canning tomatoes, but when they told us they'd like to come over and photograph us while we cooked a dish that used our canned tomatoes, we got a bit nervous.

What to make?!  In front of an audience?!

We thought about revisiting an old favorite, like Baked Eggs in Tomato-Parmesan Sauce or Creamy Tomato Sauce, but couldn't bring ourselves to do that.  The Washington Post was coming over! So we had to make a new dish.

After spotting this Tomato-Cucumber Gazpacho, we knew we had a winner.

Leftovers | Interesting Stuff from June Food Mags

Here are a few non-recipe items from June food magazines that we liked.

Martha Stewart Living

We love this suggestion for making muffins more festive and easily portable by making Crisp Muffin Wrappers out of parchment.  We tried it when making Best Blueberry Muffins (pictured right) earlier this month.  It's a great alternative to using muffin cups.

Also from MSL and Merchant4.com come these crazy Chikotan Charcoal Stirrers, which are charcoal sticks made from Japanese bamboo.  Used in high end bars in Japan, these drink stirrers absorb impurities in beverages. 

MSL also has some wonderful ideas for infused liquors, such as Beet-Cucumber Vodka, Lemongrass Peach Sake and Fennel Vodka.  As our herbs start to take off, we look forward to experimenting with some of our own. We especially like the idea of making these as gifts for housewarmings and summer gatherings.

Fine Cooking

We're going to keep Fine Cooking's handy guide to preserving fruits and vegetables through freezing at hand for later this summer, when we're in need of using up vegetables from our CSA.  Freezing through preserving is something we've experimented with for a few summers.  We've had great success with some vegetables (especially bell peppers), but also some freezing failures (like eggplant).The handy guide walks you through how to best prep 20 fruits and veggies prior to freezing them. 

Gourmet

MixMyGranola.com is a new site that allows you to create your own customized granola blend. Ingredients range from the delicious (dried blueberries and cranberries) to the exotic (Goji berries, Chia seeds) to the whimsical (gummi bears, animal crackers).

The MixMyGranola team reached out to us earlier this summer, asking if we'd like to create our own blend.  We did, building a mix that included Goji berries, dried blueberries, Chia seeds and roasted almonds.  Pricing depends on how many ingredients you add (ours totaled $11.04 plus shipping). 

If you want to give MixMyGranola a try, the site is offering Bitten Word readers 10% off their orders.  To receive the discount, use the promotion code "BITTENWORD" when you check out. 

And finally, also from Gourmet, we're in love with these adorable Pantone PA27 Series coffee mugs.  We had first seen them earlier this summer at the San Francisco MOMA gift shop. Our coffee needs these mugs.  

And now, on to July!

Juicy Buttermilk Pork Chops with Turnip Greens and Herbed Grit Cakes

Food & Wine (July 2009)

In searching for the right main course for Clay's backyard birthday dinner, we knew we wanted to cook something on the grill and to keep it relatively simple.

After a Chilled Pea and Buttermilk Soup and a trio of small summer salads, Juicy Buttermilk Pork Chops seemed destined for our menu.

Basil Vinaigrette

Food & Wine (June 2009)

We've made it to the final round of our trio of summer salads.

Following the light, citrusy Honey-Lemon Dressing and the rich Creamy Feta Vinaigrette, this Basil Vinaigrette sounded ideal!

Creamy Feta Vinaigrette

Food & Wine (June 2009)

Our salad trio progresses on!

We love the idea of a light, summery dressing, like the Honey-Lemon Dressing we served with watercress.

But we just couldn't resist this Creamy Feta Vinaigrette. It sounded so bold and rich and delicious -- we couldn't pass it up!

Honey-Lemon Dressing

Food & Wine (June 2009)

After kicking off Clay's birthday dinner with that gorgeous chilled pea soup, we knew we wanted to serve a light, summery salad. But we weren't quite sure what kind of dressing we wanted, so we turned to the food magazines for inspiration.

The June issue of Food & Wine has a great little item on their "Best 5-minute Dressings." It's a perfect feature for this time of year, when salad greens and vegetables are so abundant but you don't want to stick to the same salad night after night. And if you're like us, you may be in a salad rut, always making the same dressings.  

The dressings in Food & Wine sounded so good and looked so easy that we were quickly confronted with a new problem: how to decide which one to make?

So we didn't decide on one. We decided on three! We ended up serving a trio of mini summer salads for the dinner.

And we started the progression off with this Honey-Lemon Dressing.

Chilled Fresh Pea and Buttermilk Soup

Martha Stewart Living (June 2009)

Clay celebrated a birthday this past Wednesday.

In the run-up to the big day, we had lots of conversations about what we should do to celebrate. 

Make a reservation?  We were lucky enough to be in New York City all last week, and ate at some phenomenal restaurants, which you may already know if you're following us on Twitter. So we were a bit restauranted out. And because we we had missed our CSA share while we were gone, we were able to take a double share this week. And though we often act as if we expect them to, those vegetables aren't going to eat themselves.   

If we don't go to a restaurant, should we throw a party? It wasn't a birthday ending in "0," so there didn't seem to be a need to throw a big party, like the amazing surprise party Zach had thrown last year. So a big party was out. 

Go see Transformers 2?  No. Thank. You.

Instead, we opted for dinner in our backyard with our friends Drew and Ralph.  And we decided to kick off the meal with this Chilled Fresh Pea and Buttermilk Soup.

Grilling Whole Fish

Martha Stewart Living (June 2009)

We are slowly but surely working our way through our list of 2009 Culinary Resolutions -- Indian food, short ribs, more vegetarian meals and so on.

But this one was a little daunting -- neither of us had ever cooked a whole fish before.

We'd had it on our mind recently after seeing a terrific how-to guide about grilling a whole fish in the June issue of Martha Stewart Living. Then, when we saw this whole snapper staring up at us from the seafood counter of our local Harris Teeter, we traded glances, widened our eyes and nodded. 

It was time.

Freezer Jam

As regular readers of The Bitten Word know well, we're both from the South. We  grew up with mothers or grandmothers who would "put up" (as in, preserve) all kinds of food in the grand Southern tradition, from beans and squash and tomatoes to all manner of fruit preserves and jellies.

But it took a trip to Maine before we had freezer jam.

It was the summer of 2007, and the two of us took a little trip to Maine to visit our friends Dan and Wendy, a terrific couple that Clay had known from college. We flew into Boston, rented a car, and leisurely made our way up the New England coast, stopping frequently for all kinds of culinary treats -- lobster rolls, Whoopee pies, Moxie cola.

Dan and Wendy's house, outside the adorable town of Belfast, is a picturesque place -- long and low, covered in white clapboard, with a large barn just off the house.  The broad green lawn behind the house stretches down to a small, cold swimming pond before getting lost in a tangle of Maine woods. 

Our first morning there, we sat on Dan and Wendy's back deck, drinking coffee and basking in the warm morning sun. Wendy brought out a lovely, simple breakfast: English muffins and a jar of bright red strawberry freezer jam.

The idyllic setting already felt like a dream. The jam made it feel like Heaven.

Best Blueberry Muffins

Cook's Illustrated (May/June 2009)

Last year, we went on a blueberry binge, making pies and muffins and throwing blueberries into just about anything we could.  We’ve been a bit obsessed with strawberries lately, but when we recently found blueberries on sale, we eagerly bought four pints and brought them home.

The majority of the blueberries went into cereal, or were just eaten as a snack.  But we were most excited that the presence of blueberries in our fridge gave us an excuse to make Cook’s Illustrated’s “Best Blueberry Muffins.”

With a title like that, Cook’s makes quite a claim. Are these blueberry muffins really the best?