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.

Your microwave is not just for reheating coffee or melting butter. Nathan Myhrvold has called its capabilities “underappreciated” and Mark Bittman wanted to rename it “the whiz-bang steaming oven”. We love it for cooking bacon, and Kennedy’s Favorite Chicken is a microwave reengineered recipe that reduces over an hour of stovetop cooking time to 15 minutes in the microwave (and the results are better, too). And everyday we’re discovering more ways it can produce wonderful food quickly. So how is this all possible?

Don’t you just hate it when you cut up an apple, pear, avocado, banana, etc. and it turns brown in just minutes? It makes it tough to prepare your ingredients ahead of time (make your mise-en-place). So, why does this happen and how can you stop it?

A frequently-asked question for the Home Cook is: what do I really need to keep my knives sharp?

Over the years we’ve all had various iterations of “non-stick” cookware. The attractions of cooking with less (or no) oil and easy cleanup have always been strong. But problems of durability and concerns over chemical toxicity have fueled debate over the years.