• Mmmm insects. Some eat them outright, some ground them up into meals, and some grow their own for eating.
• For Northern Italian fare, try Vancouver's La Quercia.
• With the lunch meat crisis, what on earth is left to feed the kids in this no-peanut butter age?
• Go here for a list of wild foods that are currently in their prime.
• Recipes: Dave Seidler's Best Pancakes Ever, Sausage Topped Cornbread, and Julia Aitken's Braised Lamb and Lentils.
• Tasting wines, and the world of pricing.

• You can do a lot with clementines and tangerines.
• Soup warms you up on a cold winter day.
• Sam Adams makes extreme beer.
• Chocolate snobbery is in.
• Who makes the best canned chicken soup? Progresso? Wolfgang Puck? Campbells?
• The $11,000 coffee maker.
• Restaurant reviews: Sugar Cane, Summer Winter, and Boston's By The Viaduct.
• This week's recipes: Cornbread, Cortido, and Lamb Osso Bucco.

I made this last year and everyone seemed to love it. I think it was slightly overcooked but it still tasted great.

I come from a family that makes a traditional Stouffer's stuffing, with lots of herbs and spices, and I love it, but I love cornbread too, and this Cornbread Stuffing with Sausage and Apples (seen on Sara's Secrets on Food Network a while back) is a great side dish. I used spicy sausage but you might want to try the mild stuff.

So here it is, the day after, and if you're like me, you ate way too much food yesterday.

I got to my sister's house around 11am or so, and started the day with a couple of cups of tea. Then we moved onto the meal, where I had turkey, mashed potatoes, bread stuffing, carrots, cranberry sauce, and rolls. I also made a Cornbread with Apple and Sausage stuffing that seemed to go over well, though I think it was a little dry (if you make that recipe I would either cut the number of stuffing bags to 1 1/2 or up the liquid quite a bit). I had a couple of can of Diet Coke during the meal, so I think that made me feel better about the day.

Of course, I wasn't through yet. Later in the afternoon came all the desserts. I had a piece of my sister's Pumpkin and Cheese Cake Pie, then a slice of Boston Creme Pie. When I left for home around 7:30, I took a place with me that had two slices of banana bread, another slice of the Pumpkin and Cheese Cake Pie, another slice of Boston Creme Pie, and two brownies. All of which I ate when I got home, along with a turkey and stuffing sandwich from the stuff my roommate made earlier in the day. Wow. What did you have to eat yesterday?

(Oh, and I also started feeling rundown last night, and woke up this morning with a head cold, scratchy throat, tired feeling, etc. Am I being punished by the diet Gods?)

The most popular cornbread mix on the market is Jiffy, and even though homemade is still the top choice of cornbread loves, it is a close second. It isn't the only cornbread mix on the market and in the last year, after very stagnant sales of muffin mixes - including cornbread - Betty Crocker decided that it was time to try and revamp their product to compete with Jiffy. The problem for them was that, even though they had a good product and Jiffy only advertised through word of mouth, they had a hard time driving up sales.

A General Mills executive decided to do a little in-house research with the help of some of the company's African American employees, based on the fact that African Americans account for more than one third of all cornbread sales in the US. What he found was that they didn't buy Betty Crocker either. One employee even said "I'd never eat Betty Crocker cornbread because it's not for black people."

With the feedback from the employees and not much else, the company tweaked the packaging to feature skillet cornbread, rather than corn muffins, and approached B. Smith for endorsement and to be a spokesperson for their healthy-eating "Serving Up Soul" campaign. The endorsement of a respected, award-winning chef and restaurateur gave the rebranded cornbread a little more credibility, and sales got a boost - rising almost 25% in the last year.

• Mom's Roast Turkey, complete with turkey stuffing from Simply Recipes. How could you go wrong with something that Mom made?
• Here's a plan for Thanksgiving for One, which involves a tiny guinea hen instead of an actual turkey, from the Amateur Gourmet.
• Beer Can Smoked Turkey, from Cooking for Engineers, sounds like a good option if you're looking for something a touch less traditional.
• 101 Cookbook's Sage, Walnut and Dried Fig Stuffing is inventive and is baked alongside the bird, not in it.
• If you're a cornbread fan, try the Mushroom, Bacon and Cornbread Stuffing from Something in Season.
• Gluten Free Girl has a recipe for gluten free stuffing, which is perfect for wheat-sensitive dinner guests.
• Four Directions Dressing from Tigers & Strawberries has a bit of just about every stuffing recipe you can think of.
• If you want to learn how to make deep fried turkey, check out the guide from the National Turkey Federation. They offer suggestions for adding additional flavorings, too.

As a bonus, here are some vegetarian "turkey" or turkey-substitute ideas to try out, all of which are nice options to keep non-turkey eaters from feeling limited to side dishes when dinner is being served. Speaking of side dishes, that's what's coming up next in this series.

If this picture doesn't look like the epitome of homestyle diner food, I don't know what does. The basket of cornbread looks like exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see on the table at a place that serves really good fried chicken. The picture was taken at a Harlem restaurant called Amy Ruth's, which is known for their fried chicken and waffles, by The Girl Who Ate Everything. She describes it as being very tasty, as well as "fluffy, light, tender and moist enough not to be classified as 'dry'" and it was, in fact, served up just before she and her dining companion tucked into plates of fried chicken, fried okra and mac and cheese. It's more of a Northern-style cornbread than a Southern one, but if it tastes even half as good as it looks, I don't think that too many fried chicken fans will complain if they get this as a side dish.