These food days and months are usually more specific. We've had National Chocolate Mousse Day and Great American Pie Month, and even National Eat Something on a Stick Day. But this April holiday covers just about everything.

April is National Food Month.

So...I would suggest that this month you celebrate by eating some food. Take a look at the categories to the right and pick some recipes to make. Or check out Food Network or AllRecipes or Epicurious or one of the many other food sites around the web.

I don't think April is National Drink Month, but I would suggest drinking something with that food.

Tuesday afternoon, I was struck with unshakable need to bake a loaf of banana bread. My favorite, basic, go-to recipe generally is the Quick Banana Bread recipe from Joy of Cooking. I've made this loaf so many times that my edition of Joy naturally opens to that page when left to it's own devices. This time though, I wanted something slightly different, something sweetened with maple syrup and including a mass of toasted and chopped pecans. I googled around a bit, until I hit upon this recipe. Taking it as a starting place, I adapted a bit and I think I hit on a winner. It has a very smooth, soft texture that is not too sweet or too bland. I'm afraid my old recipe may have been supplanted by this one! If you want to try it out, the recipe is after the jump.

Vanilla is the pasta of the ice cream world. I have no idea if that analogy makes any sense, but I just made it up and I think I'll stick with it.

What I mean is this. Like pasta, ice cream is something that you can do a lot of things with. You can put various sauces on pasta, mix in chicken or beef, add various cheeses, put it in soups and salads and other meals. Now look at vanilla ice cream -- it's the base for a lot of different flavors of ice cream, you can add fudge or caramel or nuts or chocolate chips to it and it becomes a whole new thing.

Anyway, Happy Vanilla Ice Cream Day. Here's a bunch of recipes, from Good Housekeeping, AllRecipes (using Eagle Brand condensed milk), and SouthernFood.about.com. Oh, and let's not forget Thomas Jefferson's classic recipe.

Wikipedia offers the history of vanilla.

Perhaps this cookbook should have gone up before Thanksgiving, but the menu for that dinner and Christmas dinner is roughly the same and the holiday season is about more than two meals, so there is plenty of time to make good use of Allrecipes Tried & True Thanksgiving & Christmas: Top 200 Recipes. There are menu planners and variations on traditional foods, as well as the traditional recipes themselves. Since the scope of the book is limited to the end-of-the-year holidays, most everything is fall oriented and suitable for big dinners or serving at other types of gatherings. For example, the recipes cover all meals, including breakfast and desserts, in addition to mains, sides and starters. There is even a section on things that make great holiday gifts. The instructions are clear and easy to follow for every recipe and the ingredients tend to be mainstream ones. Some highlights include: Apple Cranberry Crisp, Christmas Breakfast Sausage Casserole, Easy Herb Roasted Turkey, Tangy Honey-Glazed Ham, Orange Pumpkin Loaf and Eggnog Cheesecake.

The reason to appreciate Allrecipes' cookbooks is the same reason to appreciate their site: user feedback. You may not see all the comments in the book the way you will online (although you can look them up there if you want to, as well), but you can feel pretty confident knowing that they were popular with tens of thousands of users and home cooks.

Back in April, we noted that Reader's Digest bought Allrecipes.com and there was some speculation that they might change the user-friendly site for the worse, especially since they said that they planed to use it as "the main portal to its other magazines and websites." So far, there really have been no major changes to the site, but it appears to have just undergone a major facelift. The new site (there is a site tour so you can figure out how to use it) seems to have given a much more prominent space to affiliated magazines and advertising partners and also seems to put more emphasis on the few top-rated recipes from every category. The biggest change is in layout. Instead of the fairly well-spaced pages that we were used to, where all of the non-recipe content was grouped on the right side of the page, it now seems that every bit of the screen is utilized, drawing attention away from the recipe.

They still have a great recipe database, though, so whether you like the new layout or not, there are still plenty of reasons to use the site.

Taking their media empire online, Reader's Digest has just announced the purchase of Allrecipes.com for $66 million. The publisher had only 7 magazines in its organization eight years ago, but today they have 20 in publication, as well as 40 websites. Their magazines include Taste of Home and Everyday with Rachael Ray, in addition to their flagship magazine, Reader's Digest. A company spokesman said "it instantly gives us Seattle cool and online credibility." The sale also gives them a large advertising revenue, as the major source of income for Allrecipes.com was through advertisements placed on their site.

Reader's Digest plans to make Allrecipes.com the center point of its online operations, the main portal to its other magazines and websites, potentially taking content from it to put into some of its printed media. Though spokespeople from the company denied it, the move is a fairly obvious attempt to attract younger readers to the pages of Reader's Digest.

Allrecipes.com is a user-supported community comprised of 1.8 million members, the majority of whom are home cooks. Membership, which is free, allows users to create online profiles, share recipes and leave feedback on the recipes that other users have posted. In February, it was the third most popular food site on the web in terms of page views, behind the Food Network and Kraft Foods.

Slow cookers are one of the most useful appliances you can have in your kitchen, even more so if you don't enjoy cooking or you have a busy schedule that keeps you running around and not working over the stove. You can toss together a soup or meat dish in the morning in about five minutes and when you return from work in the evening, you'll have a hot, home cooked meal waiting for you. In addition, everything cooks together, which means that you'll only have one pot to clean. Some recipes will call for the meat (or even vegetables) to be browned before adding them in, but this is almost never really necessary.

Slow cookers cook foods for long periods of time at low temperatures. Modern slow cookers often have an automatic shutoff or a super-low "warm" setting that will protect both your food and your home when you are not around to watch, so they are safe to use any time, unlike the stove or the oven. They are ideal for cooking lean or inexpensive pieces of meat because they trap juice and steam as they cook the meat, allowing the meat to become moist and tender, preventing it from shrinking or toughening. The long, slow cooking process also allows flavors to meld and blend, making it an ideal way to cook soups and stews, too.

Diet is definitely a word with a capital "D". It strikes fear into the hearts, stomachs and mouths of many who associate the word with dry, flavorless rice cakes and endless bowls of cabbage soup. But fear not: there are more than a few dieting blogs to help get you through the new year without any new pounds.

• On Slashfood, we ran a Healthy New Year series of posts with tips to get you through your day: breakfast, bringing a lunch to work, eating lunch out, snacking, tasty dinners and worry-free desserts.
• Hungry Girl offers advice, diet tips and tricks and a few of her own recipes to help you lose any lingering holiday pounds.
• Calorie Lab has a calorie counter, BMI calculator and an up-to-the-minute health news section.
• I Ate a Pie reviews any and all "healthy" diet foods, from low-carb to fat-free.
• Diet-Blog tracks down any and all diet trends, truths and lies. It's a great source for diet-related news.
• Kalyn's Kitchen is the blog of a dedicated low-carber, who puts together lots of easy to follow recipes with great photos.
• Baking Low Fat has - you guessed it - a collection of low-fat baked goods, from breads to brownies.

These are not even a small percentage of all the blogs and websites that regularly or occasionally cover dieting and healthy eating, but they're a good place to start. If you want to start with a few recipes of your own, check out the Low Carb and Healthy Living sections of Allrecipes, for inspiration.