As the saying goes, “everything is better with Bacon!” A chef friend calls it “Vitamin P” ...essential to a daily balanced diet! But how to cook it?

As you contemplate your Thanksgiving leftovers (after, of course, checking out the Black Friday deals), one of the most popular is turkey soup--you have a roasted turkey carcass with the potential to make a great flavor base for your soup. As you embark on this soup adventure, keep one thing in mind: temperature!

We just had to share this Thanksgiving recipe from a friend's 5 1/2 year old grand niece...

As we cook more during the Holiday Season, cooking odors inevitably fill the air.

Many of them are wonderful: spicy cookies, roast turkey, mushrooms ....

But other foods taste better than the smell they leave behind (think fish or brussels sprouts). What’s a cook to do?

My parents always loved caviar. It's a special treat that they never took for granted. They especially enjoyed it during the holiday season, and my mother had a way to make serving caviar easier.

Here's how to eat your onions, and have them too...

Here are the menu and recipes for a dinner party that we offered, with some wonderful partners, as an auction lot to support a very worthy cause. Our partners were Vivier WInes, a marvelous wine producer that blends the ancient traditions of French winegrowing with the youthfulness and potential of American vineyards and Hip Shakes, a wonderful band featuring Joe Shotwell. Beverly Shotwell was our photographer and amazing helper in all things.

Here are some of our favorite Chanukah videos...we apologize in advance if any offend...

Once you have the salsa, making the guacomle is a snap!

So … the summer season is starting to wind down - the grape harvest is in full-swing here in Napa Valley - and we all are searching for more ways to enjoy the abundance of zucchinis, cucumbers, and eggplants … from our own garden, your friends’ gardens, or the farmers’ markets … before winter descends. And as we approach this bounty, with a variety of recipes in mind, the fundamental question is ...to salt or not to salt?

It’s that time of year when entertaining heats up, and house visits and dinner parties abound. While a lot of what follows is common sense, sometimes we get so busy that we forget. So here are a few simple suggestions that we’ve found help us, and we hope will help you, to be great guests.

Many of our favorite vegetables have a high water content: zucchini, cucumbers, eggplant (OK: my fave, but not Piper’s!), and more. And if you try to cook them just as they come in from the garden, that extra water will effectively poach the vegetable, turning it into a soggy, tasteless (or, worse, bad tasting) mess, and it will dilute any sauce or dressing you try to serve with it. So you need to remove a significant percentage of that water, and you do that with salt.