A Literary Cornucopia.

It's an eatin' time of year, from delicious pies baked with apples from a sketchy apple tree to pink squares to stuffing that hasn't been stuffed in anything except a casserole dish. It is, to put it one way, harvest time. In honour of the twenty pounds of cheesecake I will be packing away this weekend, and in tribute to everyone's favourite cooperative board game, here are some of my favourite books about food. And sharing. Okay, maybe we'll scratch the sharing part.

Julie and Julia by Julie Powell really grew on me. It's the story of a sketchy gal from Long Island City who decides that she'll cook every single recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a way to fill her unemployed days. This book is as much about her turning-30 crisis and the resulting existential crisis as it is about the sheer magnitude of Julia Child's amazing, culture-changing cookbook. The fact that a girl in a divey apartment with a malfunctioning stove could muster up things like beurre blanc and osso bucco is, to a single girl with a sketchy kitchen like me, comforting. She also swears a lot. I like casual swearing.

Home Cooking and More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin are books that make you homesick, especially if you come from a home like mine where there is always something on the stove and someone wonderful to eat it with. Laurie Colwin started out as a sketchy gal in a crappy apartment (is there a pattern here?), cooking things like eggplant parmesan on a hot plate and doing her dishes in the bathtub (again, I relate). Over the years, she became an amazing novelist and food writer for the New Yorker, and these collections of her columns are funny, and personal, and totally delightful. You'll never think of lemons, or gingerbread, or chocolate cake, the same way again. My favourites are the piece on what to serve to someone with jetlag and the one about Halloween dinner. (Halloween dinner! This woman is a genius!) My mom passed these books on to me after Laurie Colwin had died, and I tell you, I was so sad when I realized she'd never write anything more.

Happy Thanksgiving, kids. Be kind to your turkeys.