Some people make a laundry list of New Year’s resolutions to get in shape, give up smoking, or put their sugar addiction on the shelf, at least for a couple months.  Some scoff at the idea of adhering to this cliché tradition and reject the idea of making any resolutions.  Then there are those like D.C. couple Zach Patton and Clay Dunn, who make food resolutions and actually follow through with them.

When Patton and Dunn stumbled upon an article titled “Cooking Through the New Year” on the website Serious Eats, they decided to put their neglected surplus of cooking magazines to good use and resolved to get busy in the kitchen.  Shortly thereafter, their food blog, cleverly named The Bitten Word, was born.  Patton and Dunn began their recipe quest, flipping through several issues of Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Saveur, Food & Wine, Cooks Illustrated, Martha Stewart Living and Food Network Magazines in pursuit of some recipes to test.  They ambitiously vowed to take on one recipe per magazine, bravely conquering everything from canning tomatoes and pickling watermelon rind to making Korean fried chicken and strawberry gelato and chronicling them on their blog, for better or for worse.

Now, two-plus years and countless kitchen trials later, their blog has become more than just a fun experiment.  It has essentially become a way of life.  It now includes an impressive archive of recipes (with some family recipes and original recipes in between), cookbook, kitchen gear, food blog recommendations and tips.  Patton and Dunn’s adventurous kitchen feats have successfully entertained fans of their blog all over the country, flirtatiously tempting people’s palates with gorgeous photos of their dishes and their charming and honest words.  Their blog has also received recognition from The London Times, which included The Bitten Word on their list of “50 of the World’s Best Food Blogs.” 

Patton and Dunn have been together since 2003 when they met through a mutual friend in D.C. Patton is a writer for Governing Magazine, which covers state and local government policy issues.  Dunn formerly oversaw digital marketing for the National Geographic channel and recently accepted a position as the online community director for a national anti-hunger nonprofit, Share Our Strength.  When they aren’t cooking their way through magazines, they love going to the movies and reading.  Right now, they are spending as much free time as they can poolside, and are testing out their green thumbs as first-time gardeners in their own backyard, eagerly awaiting the arrival of their first tomato.  The couple is newly engaged and is also busy planning a September wedding.

Patton and Dunn recently shared some of their culinary triumphs and flops, told me where to dine while visiting D.C. (and what to order!), talked about cooking for Michelle Obama and discussed their 4th of July menu.

Where are you both from and what kinds of foods did you grow up with?
We met in here in Washington, D.C., but we actually grew up not that far from each other – Clay in Western Kentucky, and Zach near Nashville, TN. 

Zach:  My mom is a phenomenal home cook, very intuitive and improvisational in the kitchen. She’s always made lots of Southern staples (like pimiento cheese, potato salad, and beans and cornbread) but also plenty of other cuisines, like stir fries and stuff like that. My grandmother was an old-school Southern cook: collard greens, poke sallet, biscuits, apple stack cakes.

Clay: My family was a little less adventurous in the kitchen. I can't remember ever seeing a fresh herb in our kitchen. We ate well, but it was a revolving set of dishes and hardly ever something new.  My mom does make one truly outstanding dish:  fried chicken. We've actually featured it on the blog, where we had a bunch of friends over for a taste test: Mom vs. Thomas Keller. Keller's was good, but everyone loved Mom's.

I love how your blog was conceived – what a unique and fun way to make use of all those food magazines!  How did you come up your blog’s name?
We knew we wanted a name that conveyed the idea of “eating from the printed word.”  We played with a few ideas, some more tortured than others.  We thought about “The Kitchen’s Ink” (get it?), but ultimately we just liked the sound of “The Bitten Word.” 

You seem fearless when it comes to tackling a variety of techniques in the kitchen, from canning tomatoes, making your own preserves, cooking Indian dishes and of course more recently,  making the infamous “bacon explosion.”  What are some of your biggest cooking triumphs and failures?
Thanks!  We’ll take “fearless” any day!  Let’s start with our failures—they’re much easier to recall! Our all-time biggest failure (so far) was a Chocolate Cake with Milk Chocolate-Peanut Butter Frosting and Peanut Butter Brittle. Sounds delicious, right? Well, we did something majorly wrong, because the cake just completely fell apart. Seriously, mere moments after we’d constructed it and frosted it, the layers slowly began separating, like tectonic plates. By the time we were ready for dessert, the cake had disintegrated into a pile of mush. (A tasty pile of mush, maybe. But still.) As for triumphs, we're really pleased with ourselves on the food preservation and canning that we've featured on the blog. We loved canning tomatoes, and more recently making marmalade. We're looking forward to experimenting more with that. Truthfully, we see just about any dish as a triumph when it's something that we've never done before, like baking bread, and it comes out edible!

Congratulations on getting featured in the new cookbook 55 Knives, that’s so exciting!  Would you ever consider writing your own cookbook and if so, what would you title it?
We’ve actually been talking recently about how much we’d enjoy writing a cookbook.  We’ve spent the past couple years cooking from all these food magazines, and it would be really great to focus more on our own recipes and favorite dishes. Hopefully someday!  

It’s so wonderful that you support local.  Tell me how you got involved with the CSA? 
 Actually, we found out about our CSA through our neighbors, who were members.  This is our fourth year to have a share, and we love it!  It’s so wonderful to have fresh, local produce available like this.  And the farm we belong to is actually not too far away, so we go out there for U-pick, or just to visit the place, walk around, and see what’s growing.

What is it like living in D.C and how is the food scene there?
We’ve both lived in D.C. for about 8 years, and we love it.  People tend to think of D.C. as just monuments and the National Mall, but there are some terrific neighborhoods, and there are always parts of the city worth exploring. It’s a really walkable place. And it’s a tremendously exciting time for food in D.C.  For a long time, D.C. barely even had what you’d call a food scene. But that’s all changed over the past decade.  Most celebrity chefs have an outpost in D.C. now, but there are some other, smaller restaurants that are really doing some amazing things to highlight the food of the region.

There are still some things D.C. lacks, like multiple quality brunch places, and more great, mid-priced restaurants. That will happen, though.

Can you recommend some restaurants in the D.C area?
We have a lot of recommendations. Here's one recommendation for each meal. For dinner: Michel Richard Central. Everything is good. We love the short rib pasta and the hanger steak with an onion carbonara. For lunch: Teaism. The bento boxes are lovely and we're obsessed with the salty oat cookies. For brunch: Birch & Barley. It's a newer place, but already one of the best brunches in town. For late night, get a half-smoke at Ben's Chili Bowl.

What is the most memorable meal you both have cooked together?
Zach:  A couple summers ago, we rented a cottage in Provincetown, Mass., for a week.  It was lovely, but it was the smallest house I’ve ever seen. A bed, a tiny bathroom and a closet-sized kitchen, and that was it. (Seriously, whatever you’re picturing, it was smaller!) But we got some amazing fresh scallops and cod from the seafood market, along with some wax beans from a farm stand. We had to improvise with whatever utensils and pans we could find, and we kept bumping into each other in the comically small kitchen. But the food turned out amazing—so fresh and delicious. Of course, there was no room inside the house to sit down, so we took our meals (along with a bottle of white wine) out to the tiny front porch and ate by candlelight. It was magical.

Clay: Every year we really get crazed about Thanksgiving. The food magazines are full of a ton of dishes that want to cook and write about on the blog, and it gets difficult to get through them all. This past year, we threw a "Fakesgiving" in early November, where we cooked 20 or so dishes and had about 18 friends over to eat. It took a ton of coordination, and honestly we never would have gotten the food to the table if Zach's mom and sister hadn't been there to help prep. It was so much fun and I can't wait to do it again this year!

Describe your earliest food memories.
Zach: Actually, my earliest memory—of any kind—involves food.  I was three, and I was running down a sidewalk toward my dad, who had bought ice cream cones for my sister and me.  I was barefoot, and I stubbed my toe on the sidewalk, and that was my first memory!  Another early food memory for me involves a food I couldn’t stand: egg salad sandwiches. (I’m still not a huge fan.)  My mom would never let us take our own lunch to daycare when we were little kids, except on the Monday after Easter, when the daycare inevitably served egg salad sandwiches.  I was never a picky eater, but it was one of the few things I absolutely refused to touch. So mom would let me take my lunch from home that one day.

Clay: I vividly remember the first time I ever ate shrimp, when I was very young and my family was on vacation in Florida. It was a restaurant that was on a boat (or at least shaped like a boat). It was also the first time I'd ever had a Cherry Coke, which was at that point just Coke with some cherries in it.

What recipe are you most proud of that you’ve come up with on your own?
We recently made a pork loin with watermelon rind chutney that we were really proud of. We had pickled the watermelon rind ourselves last year and wanted to use it, so that's what we came up with. It was delicious. 

What are your guilty pleasure snacks or foods?
Zach: We absolutely cannot keep peanut butter in our house, because I will polish off an entire jar in just a couple days.  It’s like a drug for me. I also have a soft spot for tacky, out-of-the-box, Day-Glo macaroni and cheese.

Clay: I love an oatmeal cookie, especially an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie. I could eat them all day, every day.  Also, I have a near obsession with Chick-Fil-A.

Any foods you refuse to go near?
Zach:  We’re both pretty much game for trying anything.  I have to say, though, I have tried and tried to enjoy mushrooms, and I just don’t.  I wish I did.  It’s not like I’d refuse them if they were served to me, but I would never choose to cook with them.

Clay:  I don’t like dill. Other than that, I’m pretty easy to please. Oh, we were at an event recently where an entire pig was being picked apart and served.  A chef was literally serving headcheese by slicing meat off a pig’s head that was just sitting there on a table.  We both steered far clear of that.

If you could invite one celebrity over for dinner, who would it be and what would you cook?
Michelle Obama! We'd make beans out of our garden. Then we'd probably subject her to some recipe we're dying to try from our most recent food magazines. Sorry Michelle, but that's part of dinner at our house.

Who are some of the chefs that inspire you?
We're reading Mad Hungry by Lucinda Scala Quinn right now.  It's definitely the kind of experience where you read someone's cookbook and question whether they might be your culinary soulmate. As far as TV chefs go, we love the Barefoot Contessa. Her approach and food is so accessible but delicious. We also love Mark Bittman for his thousands of ideas and Alice Waters for the amazing work she has done.

What types of dishes would you serve at a 4^th of July party?  Any big plans for the 4^th?
We'd do a fancy hot dog party, with homemade toppings like marmalades, ketchups, mustards. If you're feeling really ambitious, make the buns, too.  And if you're not feeling ambitious at all, make the muffuleta hot dogs that we recently featured on the blog. They're phenomenal--and really easy.

We always go to our friends' apartment for the 4th. From their roofdeck, you can watch the fireworks over the Washington Monument. It's one of the best times to live in D.C.!

What are you craving right now?
Sweet corn. It's not in season yet here, but we're counting the days.....

These two were also sweet enough to share two great and simple summer recipes they’re recently made. One is sure to cool you off in the summer heat; the other will taste just like summer.

Coffee Granita with Cardamom Whipped Cream

Bon Appétit (April 2010)

6 Servings 

2 cups water, divided

1/2 cup plus

1 tablespoon sugar

1 1/2 tablespoons instant espresso powder

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

3/4 cup chilled heavy whipping cream

1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom

Bring 1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup sugar just to simmer in heavy small saucepan over medium heat, stirring mixture constantly until sugar dissolves. Stir in instant espresso powder and vanilla extract. Remove saucepan from heat; stir in remaining 1 1/2 cups water. Pour into 9x9x2-inch metal baking pan. Freeze mixture 1 hour; stir, mashing any frozen parts with back of fork. Cover and freeze mixture until firm, at least 1 to 2 hours longer and up to 1 day. Using fork, scrape granita, forming icy flakes. Return granita to freezer. Beat cream, cardamom, and remaining 1 tablespoon sugar in large bowl until peaks form. Divide granita among bowls or glasses. Top granita with whipped cream.

Muffuletta Hot Dogs

Bon Appétit (June 2010)

Makes 8

1 cup sliced peperoncini with 1 cup brine

1 cup (packed) thinly sliced red onion

1 teaspoon dried oregano

8 all-beef hot dogs

8 hot dog buns, split

16 slices provolone cheese

Chopped black olive tapenade

Sliced roasted red peppers from jar

Mix peperoncini, brine, red onion, and oregano in bowl. Let stand 30 minutes; drain. Prepare barbecue (medium-high heat). Place hot dogs on grill. Place buns, flat side up, on grill; cover with 2 cheese slices. Grill until cheese melts and hot dogs are heated through, covering barbecue to allow cheese to melt, 5 minutes for hot dogs and 3 minutes for buns. Transfer buns and hot dogs to plates. Top with pickled onions, tapenade, and peppers.

*The Muffuletta Hot Dogs—inspired by the famed New Orleans sandwich of the same name—call for peperoncini in brine and roasted red peppers in a jar; these are available in most supermarkets, often in the condiment aisle. The recipe also calls for black olive tapenade, which is sold in the refrigerated deli section of many supermarkets and specialty foods stores. Be sure to use the chunky variety.