Football season’s in full swing, so get your gourmet game on with The NBC Sunday Night Football Cookbook, which stars 150 recipes from NFL players and many of America’s top chefs, including Emeril (bam!) Lagasse and grill – guy Bobby Flay. This eclectic cookbook puts regional down – home favorites (Houston Texan Chester Pitts’ cheesy Potato Casserole, oh yeah!) in the huddle alongside more gussied – up grub (Chef Jonathan Hale’s Deconstructed Sushi, anyone?), offering dishes that go beyond halftime hot links and tailgate chili. Also, this book has heart: proceeds benefit nationwide food banks via the Super Bowl “Taste of the NFL” fund – raising event and Feeding America program.

Intros from singer/football fan Faith Hill and Hall of Famer John Madden kick off the cookbook, which is handily organized by NFL regions from east to north, south to west, making it easy to locate a favorite team. Sections highlight a nation’s bounty of appetizers, main dishes and desserts, a far – ranging variety of foods that reflect the diversity of America’s current cultural palate. Meat – and – potatoes fans will find lots to love, especially luscious wine – braised short – ribs and an exotic recipe for bison burgers, but there’s something here for everyone – even vegans (try KC Chief Tony Gonzalez’s spicy Tom Kha Tofu soup or Chez Henri Chef Paul O’Connell’s Swiss Chard – Eggplant Crepes with Tomato – Basil Coulis). The recipes are clearly written and conveniently timed out, presented in an easy – to – follow format with wine pairings (oddly, there are no suggested brew pairings) and enhanced by color photographs – of both the food and the football greats – along with snippets of player and team trivia. A final bonus section includes three tempting Super Bowl party menus.

In 1985, Malcolm Forbes’ son Kip, acting for his father, paid $156,000 for a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite, part of a cache said to have been ordered by Thomas Jefferson but never delivered and found by workmen renovating an old house in Paris. The sale, and the huge publicity surrounding it, launched an era of what can only be called wretched excess (judging from some of the “tasting” menus) and of a hugely profitable market in fraudulent antique wine “discoveries” – a burgeoning hoax that would eventually tar several of the world’s leading wine experts, notably longtime Christie’s chief wine auctioneer Michael Broadbent (and to a lesser extent Robert Parker, creator of the controversial 100-point rating scale for wine).

It also cost any number of multimillionaire collectors an astounding amount of money, although Benjamin Wallace, author of The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine, makes it clear that some deserved it: Wallace’s stories of 12-hour tastings of rare wines, of eccentric tycoon-turned-America’s Cup winner Bill Koch’s extravagant wine cellar, and of the growing number of warning signs (holes in Jefferson’s meticulous record-keeping, dealers offering multiple cases of wine that had been made in limited numbers) ignored or downplayed by the industry are a reminder that collecting is itself a sort of mania.

It’s also competitive, and Koch, who eventually spent another fortune to prove the fraud, is more concerned with revenge than restitution. The villain of the piece is Hardy Rodenstock (an alias, as it turns out), who persuades some of the most prestigious wine tasters in the world that he is the Indiana Jones of antique vintages, particularly 18th-century Yquem, first growth Bordeaux and, of course, the “Th.J.” bottles. The “hero,” if there is one, is an unlikely team of investigators and scientists that is in itself fairly astounding.

Wallace’s painstaking research, his often pungent descriptions and an ability to temper his cliffhangers as he ducks and weaves with the narratives, make this a terrific read.

Eve Zibart is a former restaurant critic for the Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.

Before you dash out the door to this year’s holiday parties, don’t forget your host.

That is, remember to bring along something for the person who sent the invitations, set the table and swept off the front steps. Perennial hostess gifts are wine or flowers. And while nothing is wrong with these two universal tokens of appreciation, you can be a bit more creative.

Since it’s fall, how about a loaf of wonderful bread for breakfast? In my new book, I’ve got recipes for Pumpkin Bread, Zucchini Walnut Bread, Sour Cream Cinnamon Streusel Loaves, and my holiday favorite, Mindy’s Pound Cake. Or, pick up a loaf of good bread from your favorite bakery. Wrapped in parchment paper or presented in a handy foil pan ready to be reheated, loaves are a practical gift since they may be eaten at once or tucked in the freezer for a more convenient time.

Not a baker? What about a do-ahead chutney to serve alongside the roasted turkey and to spread on all kinds of weekend sandwiches? My Cranberry and Apple Chutney is quick to assemble on top of the stove and won’t spend much time in your host’s refrigerator. My aunt’s recipe for Jezebel Sauce an apricot-hued sweet and tangy sauce just right to pour over goat cheese or cream cheese as an hors d’oeuvre is equally enticing. To top potluck salads or for just nibbling out of hand, why not try my easy Sweet and Spicy Pecans? Place them in cellophane bags and tie with a ribbon, or pile into one of those cute Chinese take-out boxes found at craft and gift shops.

Packaging does say something when you’re presenting a gift, so to dress up your gifts, be on the lookout for containers and wrappings that make your food gift look great. Save department store jewelry and accessory boxes. Cover them in holiday paper, and line with waxed paper or parchment. Pack bars, candies and nuts into the boxes, then secure with a pretty bow. Or, buy small plastic organizing bins and trays. Line them with parchment or waxed paper and fill with loaves of bread, cookies or jars of preserves. Attach a bow and tag to the side. No time to cook? The supermarket has some nice grab-and-go food gifts for your host: ¥ Wander down the natural foods aisle to the bulk bins and you’ll find one of my favorite candies chocolate covered almonds. Place in a gift sack and tie with a satin ribbon.

¥ Select a variety of citrus fruit clementines, grapefruit, tangelos and bring these in a pretty sack.

¥ Pick up a nice bottle of olive oil or balsamic vinegar and tie a ribbon around the top.

And when in doubt? Show up with a bottle of your favorite wine. You can’t miss. Anne Byrn, best known as the Cake Mix Doctor for her best-selling books about spicing up packaged mixes, tackles potluck panic in her newest book, the What Can I Bring? Cookbook. A former newspaper food writer, she lives in Nashville with her husband and three children.

College students may have varying degrees of cooking experience, cooking equipment and/or money to spend on ingredients, but they usually share one thing in common: They like to eat. Sisters Megan and Jill Carle, co-authors of Teens Cook and Teens Cook Dessert, have advanced to College Cooking: Feed Yourself and Your Friends. As much as we hate the saying, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,’ there is some truth to it. . . . But, here’s a tip for you guys: girls find it just as appealing to have a guy cook for them. Anyone can take you out to eat, but making a nice dinner for someone shows that you care enough to put in the extra effort. You get bonus points for that, they advise.

Keeping hectic schedules and tight budgets in mind, the Carles provide many mouthwatering, easy-to-make and sumptuously illustrated recipes such as salmon cake with potato wedges, vegetarian chili and chicken salad pita sandwiches. Whether it’s a toga party for 20 people or a romantic dinner for two, this book will make you look like you were born with a spatula in your hand. College Cooking makes a great gift for a beginning cook and is a must-have for well-fed and well-lived off-campus college life.

Of course, if you’re beyond the scrounging stage and need more sustenance than Twinkies and Doritos to keep your mind sharp and your stomach from growling, we’ve got a few more books to keep you cooking when you head off to college. Daphne Oz’s The Dorm Room Diet Planner, the companion volume to last fall’s The Dorm Room Diet, offers practical advice not only on how to beat the freshman 15 (the dreaded pounds that unwary students pack on during their first year away from home), but how to be a more relaxed, more effective you. Through exercise (concise directions and illustrations, as well as a 20-minute DVD show you how); the right vitamins and minerals; and happiness enhancers, such as meditation, aromatherapy and massage, Oz outlines a plan for keeping your weight down and your spirits (hence grades) up.

A Princeton University student herself, Oz says that she already had the inspiration and information she needed to become a healthier person when she left for school, but writes, College proved to be my motivation, the catalyst that led to my lifestyle overhaul, because it marked the onset of my life as an adult. If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, don’t wait for a house to fall on you, get both of Oz’s books and start down the yellow brick road to health and happiness!

First there was the Savannah restaurant, then the best-selling cookbooks and the Food Network shows. Now the Southern powerhouse who built a mini-empire on trans fats offers a no-holds-barred memoir, It Ain’t All About the Cookin’, a book that’ll leave you hankerin’ for fried chicken and biscuits.

Writing a memoir, even when the revelations aren’t lavished with references to butter, can be a slippery slope (just ask James Frey). Truth is tricky when memory is involved, but there’s no bull-bleep here: Deen’s story is straightforward, bluntly honest and served up with trademark irreverent Southern spice (and her favorite recipes). My God has a sense of humor even if what I say has a four-letter word in it, she proclaims. Expletives aside, Cookin’ is a hoot, a read that’ll grab hold of you like white on rice as you devour Deen’s rags-to-riches tale.

Deen had happy childhood hours in her Grandmomma Paul’s kitchen and carefree summers spent at her grandparents’ resort; then came her high school cheerleading days, followed by a difficult marriage to an alcoholic husband. There’s heartbreak as she struggles with crippling agoraphobia. There’s divorce and poverty, and two hungry kids to support. But, always, there’s the cookin’.

Desperate, Deen did the one thing she knew that she could do. With only $200, she launched The Bag Lady, peddling homemade sandwiches to office workers. In short order, the hardworking mother went from selling sandwiches to sit-down service, starting two successful restaurants, meeting influential people, and eventually winding up on the Food Network as the undisputed queen of Southern cuisine, and host of Paula’s Home Cooking. Along the way, she found fairy-tale romance and marriage. It Ain’t All About the Cookin’ drives home the importance of love, perseverance and family. It’s also a mini primer on restaurant ownership, and a guide to the beguiling secrets of Southern charm and Southern food. Alison Hood writes from San Rafael, California.

Unlike the days when the European apprentice system was the only way to become an established chef, today there is no one route to the kitchen. Nowhere is that better illustrated than in How I Learned to Cook: Culinary Educations of the World’s Greatest Chefs, a collection of essays by 40 acclaimed chefs. Edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan, the book is a satisfying follow-up to Don’t Try This at Home, their collection of culinary catastrophe stories. While the first book was heavy on entertainment, this one delivers more in the practical wisdom department.

Each essay in How I Learned to Cook opens with a short bio of a chef, hardly necessary in most cases (Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali, Marcella Hazan), essential in others (Raymond Blanc, Chris Bianco). Each chef takes a slightly different tack, telling about childhood experiences in the kitchen, early inspirations and mentors, twists of fate or epiphanies that came later in life. All the essays are less than 10 pages long and hold a reader’s attention with their sheer diversity.

This is not just a book for culinary school students or aspiring professionals the inspiration in these chefs’ tales works for the weekend cook as well. Despite the breadth of experiences recounted from cooking under the master French chef Paul Bocuse (Daniel Boulud) to deep-frying at the snack bar of the local swim club (Tom Colicchio) cooks of every ability level will recognize the one constant throughout: passion for good food.

Lisa Waddle is a pastry baker and food writer in Nashville.

Chef Frank Stitt revolutionizes Southern cooking Back in 1982, back when the only good restaurant towns in the South were (grudgingly) considered to be New Orleans and perhaps Charleston, Frank Stitt opened the Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Alabama. It set out Stitt’s personal culinary mission to blend Southern ingredients and traditions with French provincial style and technique and showcased the sort of truck-farm seasonal produce the fast-food generation had almost forgotten. It was a quiet revolution, but one all the same, and it didn’t stay quiet long. By 2001, Stitt had won the James Beard award as best chef in the Southeast, opened two other restaurants and begun work on a much-anticipated cookbook.

At last, Frank Stitt’s Southern Table: Recipes and Gracious Traditions from Highlands Bar and Grill is in print, and it’s a beaut, warmly and generously written, with more than 150 recipes and many gorgeous photographs all shot in natural light, and with unbelievably seductive texture by former Saveur and Metropolitan Home editor Christopher Hirscheimer. The recipes run the gamut from fried green tomatoes and real pimiento cheese spread and grits (a fabulously rich version guaranteed to knock the polenta pretensions out of anyone) to roast quail with apples and pecans and guinea hen with onions and truffles. They are not essentially fancy, not unnecessarily frilly, but their freshness almost leaps off the page. And the less traditional combinations smoked trout salad with blood oranges, avocado and frisŽe; warm cabbage soup with goat cheese and cornbread crostini; grilled grouper with artichoke-charred onion relish display a stunning grasp of texture and interplay.

I’m very much influenced by my time in California and Boston and London and France and in the markets, Stitt says in an interview with BookPage, but I wanted to bring all that back to a very solid home base. I do not subscribe to fusion cooking. I’m really dedicated to authentic cultural roots. I think that’s what makes Southern writers and artists so distinctive; they grow up on the farm but then they leave for years to travel and explore and gain that sophistication, and then they come back to enrich the culture. When I was in France, I realized that the food on my grandmother’s table those butter beans and baby peas and okra and cornbread it wasn’t Ôfine food,’ but the devotion to and the reverence for those ingredients really moved me. Like many Southerners born in the ’50s and ’60s, Stitt fled north as soon as he could, first to Europe for a summer, then to Tufts University and then to Berkeley to study philosophy. But there the lure of fine food, in a city where Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse was already fueling the green food movement, began to take hold. He talked his way into a series of basic kitchen jobs, eventually getting a job (with no pay) working for Waters at Chez Panisse, and then, with her help, becoming assistant to Richard Olney, the respected editor of the Time-Life Good Cook series, and later Olney’s personal assistant in France.

It all really came together for Stitt when, 10 days into a wine-picking stint in the south of France, he had what he calls an Alabama epiphany. He began to contemplate the cycle of planting and harvest, the rhythm of exhausting work and spiritual satisfaction, and to feel a nostalgic regret for the old farmer’s markets and county fairs that showcased home preserving and perfect peaches a process of seasonal recreation that seemed both noble and familiar. And so he returned to Birmingham, to transform a daily task into a glorious event. (This writer admits to a personal peeve: Southern regional food keeps getting rediscovered not because it’s obscure, but because it’s not cuisine : it’s cooking. All those fancy food magazines that tout New York as the nation’s restaurant capital may have a point, but it’s a misleading one, because Southerners know how to cook for themselves. Who cooks at home in New York? The only recipes with Manhattan in the title are a cocktail and cheap clam chowder. So when the big-name chefs cook homestyle, they can’t just admit it, they have to turn it into some sort of trend call it comfort food, or modern American or something. So a cookbook like this, with its seemingly effortless blend of simplicity and sophistication, is especially welcome.) For Stitt, who describes himself as definitely a seat-of-the-pants, instinctual kind of chef, the strict measurement and formulation of recipes was a little uncomfortable. I never make the same thing the same way. I’m much better at being inspired by what’s in the cooler and trying to combine ingredients into the most complementary way. But having survived the process, he says he is amazed by the book, a little intimidated by it, astonished by it, gratified by it. I think it captures a lot of our spirit. We want it to be charming, kind, intelligent, and we want people to really use it. With his love of fresh ingredients, it’s no surprise that Stitt actively promotes sustainable and humane agriculture (he is active in both the Chef’s Collaborative and Slow Food) and hopes his cookbook will encourage more people to purchase local produce whenever possible. Almost his first words in the cookbook ring a near-sacred chord of memory for real food lovers: The seasons define [the restaurant menu]. If it’s springtime, we talk asparagus, favas, baby artichokes, sweet baby Vidalias, little sweet peas, spring lettuces. The cobia season is winding down, the Apalachicola flounder have been fat and iridescent, the occasional speckled trout shiny and firm . . . . and so on. It’s impossible to read such passages without seeing, and smelling, the bounties of the nation.

Stitt says he loves his other two restaurants the regional Italian Bottega, with its wood-fired pizza oven and Beaux Arts limestone facade; and Chef Fonfon, the French bistro of my dreams, which offers mussels and steak frites and croque monsieur but Highlands is still the first child, the one that demands the most attention, the one where I start my morning. He can just begin to contemplate another book, but right now, he says, it’s like contemplating having another child or falling in love again; I just want to savor the energy of this one. Eve Zibart is a restaurant reviewer for the Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.

Beloved book survives personal tragedy A life course when picked often seems utterly focused, then direction shifts and the chosen course leads to destinations unknown. Such is my story. It is the tale of how an anthropologist became a restaurant owner and cookbook author. Then, how, due to a personal tragedy, she became a disaster expert, lecturing worldwide on catastrophe. And finally, how she put it all together in a work she loves beyond all others: a cookbook and memoir celebrating Greek food, history, language, custom and life called The Olive and the Caper. It is a story of change, loss, recovery and new horizons that, I hope, is satisfying to heart and palate. I originally went to live in a Greek village as a serious-minded graduate student, but was quickly swept into workaday village life a daily, year-round, never-ceasing cycle of gathering provender and preparing it. At first, I was drafted into the life of women. With them, I simmered soup over a propane burner, gathered snails after rainstorms, baked black barley rings and bargained over fish in the market. I was welcomed every day with rounds of fresh goat’s cheese which I fried into cheese chip omelets. I picked capers and brined them, collected greens to boil and oil. All the women, sister and American stranger, baked together, each of us bringing an armful of grape twigs to fire the communal oven. Today, when I return to the village, now equipped with electric stoves, we still collect in great chatting groups to make Easter cakes and roast fig sandwiches. I then joined the life of men. I harvested barley with a sickle, threshed and winnowed kernel from shaft, picked and weighed tomatoes, stamped grapes into juice for wine. I drank grappa in taverns, and after a long day’s work, toasted a good backgammon game with a bang of my glass on the table. My unexpected affair with the glorious food of Greece led to another shift. Though I held a professorship in anthropology, I became one of the owners of the famed Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley. Soon after, Chez Panisse chef Victoria Wise and I opened a restaurant of our own and wrote three cookbooks together. Throughout, I returned to Greece constantly, exploring the life, the food and the joy of it all. Eventually I was approached to write a Greek cookbook. The book was moving along, half done, when on October 20, 1991, a spark from an old fire in Oakland re-ignited. A ferocious firestorm developed, sweeping down the hills and in four short days destroyed over 3,000 homes. Mine was one.

Ironically, I was in Greece at the time attending a food and wine conference and was able to save neither a page nor a frying pan. Twenty-five people died in the fire and 6,000 were left homeless. I lost my home and all my possessions: my photographs, heirlooms, artwork, every kitchen utensil, one car and two pets. Since my office was in my home, I lost all my years of anthropological research, my writings and my entire library. I had no salt, none to put upon my food and none left for tears. I had no thread, none to stitch my daughter’s hem and none to hold my days together. The scheme of my life was irrevocably ruptured. Who I was and what I intended to do utterly unraveled. The Olive and the Caper completely burned. I was about to let the book go when Victoria offered to help. Workman, my publisher, was supportive, but at first I demurred. As an anthropologist, and now a survivor, I knew I had to write about enduring devastation. I co-authored and edited two books on disaster. Only then did I return to my beloved Olive and Caper. The basics of life prevail: family, friends, love. I know, I have been there. For me the simplicity of carrying on, of meals, of care, both in America and Greece, has been sustenance. In the new Olive and Caper I speak of it all, of memories when none on paper remain, of rich bounty at hand, of cooking and sharing, of stories from times ancient and modern, of recovering and coming to new vistas, of vicissitudes and strength and survival, of endeavors never planned for, but once met, relished. An anthropologist, cooking enthusiast and author, Susannah Hoffman lived and worked in Greece on and off for more than 30 years. Her latest cookbook, The Olive and the Caper: Adventures in Greek Cooking, includes 325 recipes and dozens of essays on Greek food and customs.