Gourmet Live Blog

Every week we’ll be introducing you to a charter member of the Gourmet Live Socialvores, a handpicked group of food enthusiasts selected to join us on our culinary adventures. Get to know this week’s featured Socialvore (and get a sneak peek inside their fridge), then check out the full list of charter members.

What is your all-time favorite recipe from your blog?
Clay: I’ll cheat and pick two favorites. The first is a Golden Beet Salad that we did a few years ago. It’s one of my all-time favorite recipes from our blog. When the produce is good, it’s magical. I’ll also plug an original recipe that we did last year, for Indian Spiced Meatloaf with Spicy Indian Ketchup. We’ve gotten many emails from people who loved it, which makes me very happy.
Zach: I might have to go with this Korean Fried Chicken we made about a year ago. It’s very simple, but double-frying it and coating it with Korean gojujang paste just elevates it to the stratosphere.

What is the first meal you ever cooked?
Clay: The first thing I ever remember cooking when I was in elementary school was tuna salad (which I mostly filled with mayo and sweet pickles). There was also a hamburger casserole I was really fond of making (it used cream of mushroom soup and was topped with tater tots!). I also had way too much of an affinity for the deep fryer at a very young age.
Zach: I grew up helping out in the kitchen with my mom, who is an excellent cook. I can’t recall the first actual meal I ever made, but I did once get up very early on the Fourth of July, when I was about 12 or 13, and make a yellow cake “for breakfast,” topping it with whipped cream, strawberries and blueberries to make an American flag. (Obviously, I was a huge, huge nerd.)
Clay & Zach: Food also played a role in our courtship. On one of our first dates, Zach made a stuffed fish, and on another, shortly after, Clay made an absolutely awful chicken and peanut stew.

If you had to blog about one ingredient every day for a year, what food it be?
We’re absolutely obsessed with Brussels sprouts. We love them and have turned many of our readers from Brussels haters to lovers. Doing 365 posts about Brussels would be a challenge, but we’re up for it.

I will never eat:
Clay: Honestly, there’s probably nothing that we wouldn’t try at least once, as long as it’s legal and not, you know, endangered or something. We’re adventurous eaters and have tried everything from squirrel to rattlesnake. Bring on the offal!
Zach: We were just in Grand Cayman for my sister’s wedding, and there are iguanas running free all over the island. Just this morning, my dad sent me a recipe for “Iguana en Pinol,” which includes the instruction, “Grind the iguana meat into a soft mass.” I’m probably not going to be trying that.

What is your favorite restaurant and what do you order there?
In DC, our favorite restaurant right now is probably Brasserie Beck. It’s excellent as a special occasion restaurant and for emergencies, like mussel cravings. We typically start with one of the mussels dishes, which are the best we’ve ever had. After that, it’s a toss-up. We like nearly everything we’ve had on the menu. But no matter what we order, a plate of fries is non-negotiable. Brasserie Beck serves delicious fries with three kinds of flavored mayonnaise. Each mayo is terrific, but the curry mayo is swoon-worthy.

What other blogs, food or otherwise, do you read regularly?
We both love the Best Week Ever blog. They have the funniest recaps of Top Chef, and in general we just really enjoy the authors’ senses of humor. We keep tabs on a lot of food blogs. There are the usual suspects that I’m sure many others have named, but we’ll highlight a few that are newer to us: Running with Tweezers and The Dog’s Breakfast.

When you’re not blogging about food or cooking, what other activities do you do?
In our professional lives, Clay works for the anti-hunger organization Share Our Strength, and Zach is a journalist for Governing magazine. Outside of work, we’re actually training for a 10-mile race later this spring, so that’s taking up a lot of time right now. We’re also working our way through “Friday Night Lights” and are in the early stages of planning both our garden and a trip to China later this year.

Is there a food you used to hate, but now love?
There are definitely foods that we’re both coming around to. For Zach, it’s mushrooms, which he used to not touch but is trying to warm up to. For Clay, it’s dill, a flavor that he used to hate but is trying to like.

If you were trapped on a desert island with only five ingredients, what would you pick?
There are a few things we’re never without that we’d probably want on the desert island: fresh eggs, bananas, oatmeal, tuna and bourbon. We couldn’t actually make anything good with those ingredients, but at least we’d be drunk while trying to scarf down a banana and tuna omelet.

What is your current food fix?
Clay is having a love affair with pistachios right now. Zach is fixated on grilling as the weather is warming up – we can’t wait!

A sneak peek inside The Bitten Word's fridge.