The Bitten Word

Granny Ragland's Chocolate Gravy

When I was growing up in Tennessee, I loved going to visit my grandparents. Exploring the old barn in the field behind their house. Running around the cool, dark basement filled with Pa's tools and Granny's canning supplies. Horsing around with my cousins on the rope swing in the backyard.

But the best part was waking up to a house already filling with breakfast smells -- eggs, country ham -- and walking into the kitchen to find that Granny had made a batch of biscuits and her famous chocolate gravy.

Last year, when Granny asked if I wanted anything in particular for Christmas, I told her I would love it if she would just write down some of her favorite recipes. On Christmas Day, when she handed me a stack of handwritten recipe cards, I knew without looking which one would be on top -- this delicious chocolate gravy.

Easter: The Perfect Carrot Cake

We made this fantastically delicious carrot cake a little while back, but we're just now getting around to writing about it.

We wanted something sweet to cap off our Easter brunch, and a carrot cake seemed like just the thing. The recipe we found, from The Gourmet Cookbook, turned out to be perfect.

It's easy (especially if you have a food processor), impressive (especially if your guests are a little tipsy from a three-hour brunch) and incredibly, incredibly delicious (period).

Easter: Planning a Brunch

It had been a while since we had invited a group of friends over for a meal, and we thought Easter was the perfect time to invite friends.  There are a few things we did that made the event easy and not overwhelming.  So here are a few brunch tips from The Bitten Word.

1.  Lists:  We made three lists that helped us keep track of everything: who we like, who we hate, and what we were wearing. 

Just kidding. 

Our three lists were:  (1) Who was coming, (2) Ideas for dishes to serve, and (3) Ingredients we needed for those dishes. 

Maybe those are common sense, but it helped keep us focused. 

2.  Plan your serving dishes: A smart lady we know (Z's mom) taught us this trick, which helps since we don't have that many dishes:  match your serving dishes with the food you plan to serve prior to the day of the vent. 

We simply wrote the names of our brunch dishes on index cards, and dropped them into serving platters or bowls.  It helped us know if we had enough dishes, or if we needed to make an emergency run to the Crate & Barrel Outlet (which we did the day before this brunch). 

St. Patrick's Day: Chocolate Stout Cake

Bon Appétit (September 2002)

We'd been craving a rich, gooey chocolate cake for a while. Our St. Patrick's Day dinner gave us the chance to try this amazingly delicious Chocolate Stout Cake, which we found in an old back-issue of Bon Appétit.

To cut to the chase, this should be your go-to chocolate cake from now on, regardless of the season. The stout adds this fantastically dark, malty earthiness to balance the sweetness of the sugar and chocolate. And the stout helps the cake stay rich and moist.

In short, drop everything you're doing right now. Run to your home. Make this cake.

St. Patrick's Day: Irish Soda Bread with Raisins and Caraway Seeds

Bon Appétit (October 2002)

Though this isn't a new recipe from Bon Appétit, it seemed appropriate to stick with the magazine for an accompaniment to our Irish Corned Beef and Vegetables.  We have virtually no experience baking bread, and therefore had assumed that making Irish Soda Bread would be a difficult task. 

We were very wrong.

Why The Bitten Word?

We love food magazines and subscribe to Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Cook's Illustrated, Food & Wine, Everyday Food and Martha Stewart Living.  Over the last year, we only rarely put the magazines to use, instead allowing them to form a not so tidy pile in our apartment. Inspired by this post on Serious Eats, we're resolving to put our food magazines to work this year, cooking at least one recipe from each magazine.  We'll post our results, and show you how it turned out.