For anyone looking for a sweet worth mail-ordering for Valentine’s Day, or any day, B.Hall Baker’s new mini whoopie pies are now available online. Washington, DC-based Beryl Hall, a former Hill staffer, keeps the calories low by keeping the pies small (she bakes them in madeleine molds). She gives her red velvet pies a rich tang (and a vibrant red color) with raspberry juice, raspberry extract and powdered raspberries from France. “Whoopie pies are a Yankee thing, but I’m trying to make them Southern,” the San Antonio native says, so this spring she’ll release coconut-cake and bananas Foster versions.

A few months ago, wine editor Ray Isle and I enjoyed some amazing caviar at Atelier Robuchon, made all the more intriguing because Joël Robuchon called it his official caviar and said it came from China. We were hoping someday we'd be able to buy tins of it to serve at parties, and now we've just about gotten our wish. Epicure Pantry, supplier to many of New York's finest chefs, just released a version called Kaviari "Kristal," made from the eggs of Schrencki sturgeon farmed in China, and selected and packaged by the Paris-based Kaviari company. Kaviari is guarded about its sources, but assures that these are among the best fish farms in the world. What we do know: The eggs are plump, briny and buttery, with a lovely pop and a clean finish. They'd be great on their own or on a blini; to offset the splurge-level cost ($138 for 50 g/1.75 oz), pair them with a terrific value Champagne.

Our gift guide this year is organized around six of our favorite cookbooks of 2009, from Ad Hoc at Home to Down Home with the Neelys. Here are four more standouts for your holiday-shopping consideration.

1) A Boy After the Sea
To benefit a charity named for his son, Vancouver chef Kevin Snook has assembled mind-blowing seafood recipes from everyone from Alice Waters to Ann-Sophie Pic, all of them beautifully photographed, in the name of an extraordinary cause.
Great for: Aspiring chefs, seafood lovers, fathers and sons.

2) The Craft of Baking
Karen DeMasco has a magic touch with sugar, butter and flour, and now so can you.
Great for: Beginner bakers, advanced bakers, anyone likely to bake you something in the next year.  

3) Growing Good Things To Eat in Texas
No recipes, just sweet, homespun profiles of Lone Star farmers by Pamela Walker (family to F&W's Ray Isle).
Great for: Farm lovers, CSA subscribers, Texans, Texan wannabes.

4) Appetite City
A sharp, funny and illustrated history of New York dining by William Grimes, former dining critic of the New York Times.
Great for: Big Apple lovers, history buffs, aspiring writers.

 

Inspired by a trip to Italy during which she walked and ate herself silly, Moira Campbell (a friend of mine, full disclosure) quit her job in restaurant PR this past summer to form Rum & Blackbird, a company that gives tasting tours in New York. She began taking groups around her Hell's Kitchen neighborhood last month, visiting stops like Xie Xie for seven courses' worth of food. This holiday weekend, the food will be inspired by Thanksgiving, with dishes like turkey empanadas with cranberry salsa from Empanada Mama, sweet-potato bourekas from Gazala Place and cranberry orange biscotti from Biscotti Di Vecchio. Next month she'll start having guest chefs along for the ride, including Alexandra Guarnaschelli and F&W Best New Chef 2001 Anita Lo, who will be on the December 5 tour at 3 p.m.

What can someone like me, a girl living in Queens, NY, possibly learn from a bunch of Park Avenue socialites with names like Muffie Potter Aston? A lot, I learned, after I read Park Avenue Potluck Celebrations, a new book by New York Times columnist Florence Fabrikant; it's a compilation of recipes and entertaining tips from some of the city’s most celebrated hostesses and members of The Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (proceeds from the book will go to the center). Here, a few surprisingly down-to-earth tips from high society that I'll actually adopt:

1. Be worldly—follow the Swedish tradition of eating birthday cake for breakfast on your birthday.
2. Drink a cocktail before party guests arrive—it'll loosen you up and make you a better hostess.
3. Be a gracious and unflappable hostess, unperturbed by spilled wine or a crying child. Note: See #2, which will help.
4. Lottery tickets make great place cards—that’s one way to make it to Park Avenue.
5. Note for next year: Hand out to-go wine cups for parents accompanying trick-or-treaters on Halloween.

Scrounging for a last-minute Halloween costume? Get inspiration from some of our favorite chefs’ ensembles in F&W's "Dress Like a Chef" slideshow, like Mario Batali's now-iconic look: red wig pulled in a low ponytail, baggy shorts and his signature orange clogs from Crocs.

Forget ham: The real reason to be excited for Sunday is that the Washington Post will announce the winners of their third annual Peeps diorama contest. Last year, they got more than 800 submissions. That means more than 800 people took time out of their busy, harried lives to construct elaborate, awe-inspiring tableaux of chick- and rabbit-shaped sugared marshmallows. The winner, 22-year-old Lauren Sillers of Potomac, Maryland, constructed her Tomb of King Peepankhamun with Peeps, Christmas lights and acrylic-paint Peeps hieroglyphics. If you ever need reminding of the wonders of humanity, if you ever need your faith in our collective ingenuity restored, flip through the Peeps Shows
of 2007 and 2008.

But, because ham really is the main reason to look forward to Sunday (and because we have no recipe for Peeps—yet), check out our own inspiring slide show of 15 delicious Easter dishes to serve with yours, including Mario Batali's clever asparagus with pancetta and Daniel Boulud's creamy pea soup.

My mom lives by the mantra that all-natural is always better. So last weekend when I went to visit, I found her in the kitchen ranting about Paas, the popular Easter-egg dye. After many years of Paas-stained fingers and perfectly colored Paas eggs, my mom was having an all-natural Easter-egg-dyeing epiphany. "Think of all the chemicals," she exclaimed. "Maybe we should make our own food-based dyes." And so our experiment began. We tried blackberries, beets, red onions, saffron, turmeric, each mixed with some water and vinegar. The eggs needed to soak much longer for the color to adhere, but the end result actually looked pretty good. We even blotted the blackberries directly onto the eggs to get a sponge-painted look.

"What about wine,” my mom asked? “Merlot, Cab, Syrah?" I had to laugh. F&W's Kristin Donnelly has been brainstorming ideas for what to do with a bottle of wine you don't like for an upcoming story. I don't think Easter-egg coloring will make Kristin's short list, but we decided to try it anyway. I went back to NYC and poured a bad Cab I'd left sitting out into a cup with vinegar and let a hard-boiled egg soak for about an hour. The result: A horribly ugly, grayish-brown hue. My mom texted me the next morning to say that her Merlot-dyed egg was a failure as well. We'll just have to stash the bad wine until Kristin tells us what to do with it and stick to fruit and vegetables for egg dyeing.

If retweeting is re-posting a twitter feed, what's the word for re-blogging a Facebook status update? Retatting? This is a retat. Last night I got so excited I mentioned this on my Facebook page. A vegan friend is coming for Passover, and while concocting vegan main courses and a dessert is fairly brainless (see these excellent vegan main courses from F&W and desserts from Babycakes vegan bakery), I got kind of addled at the idea that anyone might feel left out during the requisite courses of gefilte fish and matzo ball soup. The soup was easy: I made my vegetable broth look like chicken stock by browning the onions in a little olive oil before simmering them in water. Then I added big florets of cauliflower, which look a lot like matzo balls, and simmered them until soft.

Vegan gefilte fish was the stumper. Gefilte fish, for me, is mostly just an excuse to clear my sinuses: The bland quenelles of whitefish taste best swirled in peppery beet horseradish. (They're also a fun way to paint your plate purple.) So what's bland, holds together in quenelle form without eggs, and goes well with a peppery beet-colored condiment? It only came to me at about 11 pm: chickpea cakes! My recipe: Sauté a finely minced quarter of a white onion (or 2 large shallots) in 2 tablespoons of olive oil with a pinch of dried thyme and a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes. Add the rinsed chickpeas from one 15-oz can, cover and simmer until just heated through. Remove the pan from the heat and let cool. Add 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest and season with salt and pepper. Mash the heck out of the peas with a potato masher and form into 1/4-cup mini-footballs. Cover and refrigerate before serving. We'll see how they go over at this evening's seder. But three of them made for a lovely midnight snack last night.

Easter is this Sunday. This means that my mother has started baking her annual batch of pizza rustica using a recipe from her aunt, a stubborn woman who, because of a lamp, did not speak to her sister (my grandmother) for six years. Per this aunt's instructions, my mother will whisk six eggs and some flat-leaf parsley with half a pound each of fontina and Parmesan cheeses before adding six pounds of ricotta and half a pound each of cubed salami, soppressata, prosciutto and ham. This will make three to four double-crust pies. Clearly, we’re not light eaters.

Curious about its origins, I discovered that pizza rustica is an Easter staple in Naples. Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of Cucina del Sole, has heard of it among the Pugliese and the Abruzzi and confirmed that it’s pretty widely eaten in the whole southern Italian boot. In my house we actually call it “pizza gain”, a phrase that’s an Italian-American corruption derived from pizza ripiena or piena, meaning “stuffed” or “full” in Italian. In short, piena, or chiena in certain dialects, became chien', then “gain” as it got passed down across generations (and an ocean). These pies, most made from some combination of cheese, meats and eggs in a sweet crust, are meant to break the Lenten fast by offering many of the rich treats given up as a sacrifice.

And break the fast it does. David Greco, who runs the Arthur Avenue Café and Mike’s Deli in the Bronx, makes a Neapolitan-style rustica based on his maternal grandmother’s recipe that’s very similar to my mother’s – and one that weighs in at a little over three pounds a pie. He’s been selling 200 a day for the past week. His secret is a touch of lemon zest in the crust. He also makes a Calabrian version from his father’s family with chunks of soppressata and thinly-sliced prosciutto baked into an eggy focaccia. Frank Generoso of the Royal Crown Pastry Shop in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn says the key to his rustica is using the best quality ricotta that’s firm but still creamy. A thick ricotta, he says, will hold up and not run all over the place.

My mother's is still the best, especially a couple of hours out of the oven. I should start fasting now to heighten the enjoyment of that first bite.