Kate's Global Kitchen: Great Gifts, Thanksgiving, and Festive Foods

the appetizer:

Kate presents her Holiday Gift Picks, starting with her new book Great Bar Food at Home; plus Green Gifts Galore; some Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips; a sampling of Entertaining Tortas; then prepare for the big holiday with Thanksgiving Recipe Headquarters. Also, don't miss Feast on Figs (six ways) and Nigella Lawson's beef in What to Eat This Month.

Great Gifts, Thanksgiving,
and Festive Foods

by Kate Heyhoe

Great Bar Food at Home

For holidays, gifts and year-round pampering

Now available! Sample '21's Crab Cakes from my newest book (which also makes a terrific gift, for yourself or others). Exclusive website bonus: Glamorous Garnishes for Bar Food at Home. This season, be the host with the most in style, compliments, and good cheer, and serve up easy, do-ahead nibbles. Gorgeous photos and a bar food-drink pairing guide, too. Great Bar Food at Home

Fissler Pressure Cooker

Green Gifts Galore

Christmas comes but once a year, but the gift you give may last forever... and that can be good or bad. Every week through Christmas, we're spotlighting gifts with positive environmental impact, ones we can personally vouch for as better than conventional counterparts. We're updating our annual Holiday Gift Guide and New Green Basics site with fully tested reviews on energy-saving small appliances (like induction burners), fair trade edibles (chocolates, nuts and more), cookware (like pressure cookers and pre-seasoned cast-iron), and other goodies. Give Rudolph a green, energy-efficient nose this year, and let him lead the way.

Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips
A Surprisingly Fun Gift

A cancer book, as a holiday gift? Well, yes. This isn't just any cancer book. It's the feel-good cancer book of the year. Seriously. It's full of un-patronizing comfort, inspiring ideas, laughs out-loud, and crazy yet empowering perspectives aimed at anyone touched by cancer. At 31, the sparkly and energetic Kris Carr was told she had a rare, incurable cancer. From that moment on, she documented every aspect of her experience, creating this hip, colorful book and a documentary as well.

The book's vivid collage of articles and tips are laid out like a scrapbook (with snapshots) of her cancer journey. The story begins on Valentine's Day, 2003, when she was told she had a rare, terminal cancer, and never really ends (which, in this case, is a good thing; we want Kris to keep on truckin').

Kris lives and works the concept of "positive and pro-active" but she's also human in her frustrations, tears and fears. "Living with cancer is all about mental management," she writes. She invents the term "progression-free remission" and defines it as "lazy and (thankfully) unproductive tumors that just hang out like couch potatoes. (No term existed between "remission" and "cured.") The term became a personal coping tool for a chronic disease she would need to manage the rest of her life.

She fell in love and married her documentary film editor on September 9, 2007, and they plan on having kids. She formed a "posse" of young, hip women also with (or survivors of) cancer. Sheryl Crow, models, activists, playwrights, activists, homemakers, actresses, and more. She went to "buddha camp" ("exploring all the emotional sandpaper that was making living so raw and scratchy"). And she developed a healing diet: vegan, organic and mostly raw. The book's handful of recipes don't make it a cookbook, but it's an inspiring tome that will feed the spirit of anyone who reads it, cancer-connected or not. Visit her blog at crazysexycancer.com (and find out where/when the documentary is televised) and buy Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips here.

Thanksgiving Holiday Headquarters

Get years of Thanksgiving experience in one easy click. We've got everything you need to know, from some of the nation's finest chefs. Including free-form stuffings; turkey, duck and pheasant recipes; brining tips; side dishes and gravies; cranberries and pumpkins; pies, desserts, and leftovers. Yum!

Thanksgiving Recipes

NewGreenBasics.com brings practical green solutions to the kitchen-conscious, and is the evolving companion to my upcoming book, New Green Basics: Greener Ways to Cook, Shop, and Clean. At my New Green Basics blog, you'll discover food-related items like...

Entertaining Tortas by Rising Sun Farms

With Rising Sun Farms Tortas, you'll shine as the perfect gourmet, and stress-free, host. Simply grab one of these layered cheese tortas from the freezer, pop it out of the container to thaw, and serve with crackers or breads, or melt into a sauce. Our personal picks: award-winning Pesto Dried Tomato Cheese Torta and Cranberry Orange Cheese Torta. Though we've not sampled them, gorgonzola, artichoke-lemon, key lime, and other flavors fill their torta line. They're available nationwide (see risingsunfarms.com for retailers and products; Texans can find exclusive Southwestern-seasoned tortas at Central Market stores).

More at New Green Basics

Feast of Figs

Dedicated foodies have rediscovered the pleasures of figs, and we're seeing some exciting concoctions made with this ancient fruit. Brush up on your "fig fundamentals," and whip up some figgy fun with:

Pumpkins & Mixed Winter Squash