Welcome, EatingWell, and Not a Moment Too Soon

EatingWell.com

I'm very glad that a partnership we've been working on for a long time—recipes from EatingWell magazine and EatingWell.com, one of the best-run and most useful cooking sites I know, on the Food Channel, and some of our pieces on theirs—has come to fruition just in time for the weeks when a lot of us get our kitchens into high gear, and for the next six weeks food will be on our minds, and in our refrigerators and pantries, in greater excess, I mean abundance, than any other time of year.

So ideas from EatingWell come just in time to save you from the worst of the regret and remorse that will drive people en masse to its site on January 2. Its recipes are not just sensible but good, in a very unfussy and doable way that has been the hallmark of the magazine since it began, in beautiful Charlotte, Vermont, down the road from Shelburne Farms.

I was the magazine's first restaurant critic, and many of the most significant friendships I formed during my years getting to travel around the country looking for local- and sustainability-minded chefs, then very unfashionable and very very much in the minority, have stayed with me to this day. As have my deep admiration for our very own Barry Estabrook and the incomparable editor Rux Martin, who brought me there in the first place.

Today EatingWell is in the very capable hands of Lisa Gosselin, and she's brought it with full force into the internet era, with the kind of smart, simple, but not dumbed-down recipes you can find on last week's Thanksgiving side slide show, and today's collection of dessert recipes—two of the meal categories that annually bedevil cooks.

Including us. Yesterday my spouse and I ventured into Whole Foods for just the preliminary list for the dinner we're hosting on Friday, and it was the predictable crush. We went with guidance from Regina Charboneau, whose series last year and this will give you sensible, calming, and original advice for feeding a crowd this week. Particularly if you've got to provide the turkey, too. It's usually one or the other, and for us this year it's sides and desserts.

As always, recipes are blueprints you use as suit you—and I'm already adapting EatingWell's on sweet potatoes, to accede to my stepdaughter's wish, a.k.a. command, that we include marshmallows. They're organic and gluten-free, of course. And the potatoes come from two farms, both as it happens remnants from farm shares that my sister and another friend kindly dropped off. And at Whole Foods we of course turned out backs on the Californian cauliflower and Brussels sprouts—the Jamaica Plain farmers' market has its last rally tomorrow afternoon! And it goes out with a particular burst of glory, with warmly saffron-colored heads of cauliflower and the sculptural Romanesco cauliflower I might subject my family to looking at in the middle of the table along with the sugar pumpkins, and of course eating.

More from all of us as the countdown continues this week—time to draw up another marketing list! And go straight to our happy new EatingWell collections to draw up yours.