Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

• Green Thumb Sunday: Dew on the collard green
• Green Thumb Sunday: They’re green…for now…
• Green Thumb Sunday: Soon…very soon…
• Green Thumb Sunday: Wishing well
• Green Thumb Sunday: Opening

But what I love, unequivocally, are the small producers that I’ve come to know and adore as I’ve moved across the country and gotten more and more into local, organic and sustainable eating. That’s part of why I became a Foodzie partner—it allows me to show some love to some of my favorite products from some of the local producers that make my kitchen a tastier place to eat.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, Foodzie is running a contest right now: show how much you love your favorite small producer, and you could win a $100 gift card to use with any of the producers on Foodzie. The deadline to enter is February 5, so go check it out on the Foodzie blog. The winner will hear from them by February 8, which should give you enough time to place an indulgent Valentine’s order for yourself and a sweetie…or, just yourself, because you are so very, very worth it.

(And, just to note for the record, I have no stake in this particular game…just thought it might be a nice opportunity for my readers!)

• Finding food in farm country
• Vote to promote healthy food
• Growing a Valentine strawberry
• Contigo has stolen my heart
• Feelin’ groovy

The year is almost over, and it’s time to settle on the menu for New Year’s gatherings. I love using New Year’s Eve as an opportunity to serve rich, elegant food that celebrates the year past and the year to come. I also love serving small bites rather than a big meal: it provides flexibility so guests can arrive in their own time, and frees me up to enjoy the party rather than preparing dinner.

In honor of that, I offer up 12 suggestions for appetizers that would work well at a New Year’s party. They fall in three categories: cheese, seafood and meat.

Cheese

We’ll start with a simple, elegant crowd-pleaser. Baked Brie is always a party hit, and Elise of Simply Recipes serves up a sweet-yet-savory, creamy option that is sure to make your New Year’s guests happy.

If you’re up for Brie but want a slightly different option, Lisa of My Own Sweet Thyme provides some taste-tested Brie appetizer ideas that also show off the creamy cheese to its best advantage.

Fondue is always a fun option, but not everyone has a fondue set. Luckily, this elegant appetizer is quite possible to pull off without special equipment. Stephanie of A Year of Slow Cooking puts a small slow cooker to use for her Fancy Cheese Fondue Little Dipper recipe.

If you’re a fan of Crab Rangoon but want a vegetarian alternative, the Scallion Cream Cheese Bites from Des of Life’s Ambrosia might just be what you’re looking for. “They are quick, they are easy, they are bite size and not to mention they look pretty good on your table,” Des wrote.

Seafood

Jen of Use Real Butter recommends her Crawfish Phyllo Turnovers as an elegant appetizer option. She made them for Christmas Day, but they would go well on a New Year’s holiday table, as well.

My Mom’s from Baltimore, so I grew up on blue crab, and love all crabby dishes I can get my hands on. Alanna of Kitchen Parade features some Mini Crab Bites that are simple, healthy, quick to make, and feature crab as the real star of the show. She’s been taking them to New Year’s celebrations since 1996, and I think it’s time anyone who loves crab start incorporating them in their New Year’s menu.

From French Cooking for Dummies comes an idea for Coconut Ceviche Appetizer Spoons. This fresh, tropical preparation also features a fun serving method.

Bea of La Tartine Gourmande offers up her Duo of Vegetable Mousses and its Tuna Tartar, an appetizer best served in small glasses so guests can see the beautiful layers.

Meat

A lovely way to work ahead is to make a mousse or pâté to spread on crackers or crostini. Julie of A Mingling of Tastes provides two wintry and celebratory options: Apple-Thyme Chicken Liver Mousse and Pistachio-Chicken Liver Pâté. Julie offers this advice to those who haven’t eaten or served a chicken liver dish before: “If you’re not so sure about chicken livers, consider this: they are so cheap and easy to prepare that you won’t be taking a big risk if you don’t like them. If you’re worried about squeamish friends and family, just call these dishes ‘country pâtés’ and hope they are too embarrassed to ask you to explain exactly what’s in it. After the first bite, they won’t care anymore.”

If I ever thought I wanted to be a vegetarian, meatballs would abuse me of that notion. This recipe for Teriyaki Meatballs from Karly of Buns in My Oven sounds like a delicious twist on the kinds I usually make.

Puff pastry is an incredibly easy way to dress up an appetizer. Though I’ll admit I’ve never tried to make my own puff pastry at home, I’ve found that buying frozen sheets of it works just fine, particularly for dishes like the Sausage in Puff Pastry suggested by Rita of Pink Bites. If you made the Baked Brie mentioned above, you might even have leftover puff pastry from that recipe that could be the perfect fit for this appetizer option.

Finally, Todd and Diane of White on Rice Couple offer up Vietnamese beef wrapped in wild betal leaves, or Bò Lá Lốt, which is one of the courses in the traditional Vietnamese Seven Courses of Beef. “These spicy, peppery Việt herb leaves add a nice, punch of flavor to these awesome, garlicky beef appetizers,” Todd and Diane wrote. “They can be eaten alone, straight off the skewers or wrapped in fresh springrolls.”

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Holiday Cocktails to Cheer Any Party features a list of liquor-based cocktails in a range of complexity levels.

If sparkling is more your speed, try my round-up of The Best Sparkling Holiday Cocktails.

This week, I’ll also post a round-up of appetizer ideas to help with your New Year’s planning. Stay tuned!

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The problem is that to pick that bone, I’m going to have to admit something.

Yes, people, it’s true. I have a subscription to US Weekly. It’s a short subscription, one that I’m pretty sure I got through some deal from Amazon.com or MyCokeRewards.com or something, and it has nothing to do with how interested I am in the dirt behind the Tiger Woods sex scandal, because I really prefer much more high-minded reading. You know, like Rachael Ray.

Anyway, it’s coming to the house, which means I have to read through it. I mean, I have to, because it arrives, EVERY WEEK, and how is anyone supposed to resist that onslaught of Stars—They’re Just Like Us!? No one is supposed to resist that. That is the only correct answer here.

So, the issue before Thanksgiving featured some celebrity recipe ideas, most of which actually made sense in context of the holiday. The First Family’s White House Whipped Sweet Potatoes was the kind of recipe that could be sourced at a local farmers’ market and that was actually seasonal. I’m not a fan of Jon Gosselin, but his Apple Crisp recipe certainly seemed easy and festive. And Lauren Conrad’s Stuffing, well, it didn’t break any new grounds, but it was loaded with vegetables and dried fruit.

But Kristin Chenoweth, your contribution was Broiled Asparagus? Really? Asparagus, olive oil, salt and pepper, “Transfer to a platter and voilá!” Yes, voilá indeed, Kristin. Way to bring something totally unseasonal to the holiday table. And US Magazine, stick to what you do best: scandal and rating of fashion. You are so much less fabuloUS in the kitchen.

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We’ve never really been that kind of family. Sure, there are traditional dishes that show up often, but this year, when I sent out an email asking if anyone had any required dishes to show up at Thanksgiving, I was met with a resounding silence.

But two years in a row, I’ve served the cornbread and sausage stuffing recipe that Amanda of What We’re Eating posted just in time for Thanksgiving last year, and it may become a staple of my holiday table from here on out. Studded with delicious pork garlic sausage made locally by my favorite butcher and crumbly with cornbread, it’s the perfect gravy-delivery mechanism.

Christmas is always even trickier than Thanksgiving, because while my family has a tradition of having a big Christmas dinner, the main course rotates from year to year, and the side dishes change based on who’s contributing and what everyone feels like. But it generally provides an opportunity to do something out of the ordinary, like the year that Mom rocked a crown roast of pork so delectable that I still think about it. It’s the kind of dish I could never attempt as a single girl cooking for one, so it’s all that more fun to share a dish like that with family and friends around the holiday.

What are your favorite holiday pork recipes? In the comments, share either a full recipe or just a story about how you use pork in dishes on your holiday table. I will use random.org to select a comment number—that person will win a $50 gift card, just in time for last-minute holiday shopping!

But even better, for each comment you leave, the National Pork Board will provide five pounds of pork (up to 100 pounds) to the Alameda County Community Food Bank. Even if you don’t live in my neighborhood, your comment and story can help provide food for hungry people, and that’s the best holiday gift I know.

Thanks to the National Pork Board for providing the food donations, the gift card and sponsoring this contest. Comments will be considered valid if they’re left before midnight PST on December 18. Make sure you include an email address with your comment so I can get in touch with you if you’re the winner. On the 19^th, I’ll announce the winner!

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Disclosure: The National Pork Board’s PR firm sent me a gift card for taking the time to post about and promote this campaign.

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Oh, I know. First-world problems, really. I MUST CLEAN. I MUST BUY CRAZY AMOUNTS OF LOCALLY-SOURCED FOOD. I MUST TEAR MY HAIR OUT AND RANT AND ROAR AND WHINE. So, enough already. Here’s the sunny side of the street.

For the second year in a row, my parents are celebrating with me at my Oakland apartment. And we’ll be joined by four of my friends with whom I cannot wait to share the day. It’s going to be a mesh of cultures and backgrounds and, you know what, people, that is exactly the way I like it.

I’m so grateful this year to be in California. Maybe more grateful than I was the first Thanksgiving here. It has become more of a home to me than I could have ever imagined, and the experiences I’ve had here are all of a kind that leave me breathless, sometimes speechless, and always wanting more. Finally, without compromise or concession, I’m living a life I’ve been in training for since I was born…I just didn’t know what I was practicing for.

I’m grateful to have my parents joining me for the holiday. My parents are amazing, and you would never guess how old they are because they defy age and gravity with aplomb, and we are a tight group of three, always have been. So I’m blessed to share my home with them, even though we’ll, no doubt, have a couple of sharp moments along the way. I love them fiercely, and I couldn’t be where I am, and celebrating this holiday, without them setting me on this path in the first place. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

And I’m grateful to all of you who are reading this. Whether you’ve been reading the blog since I started (and have stuck with it through this odd period of no garden, and therefore, not many tales of my inability to grow things), or you have come to it via Facebook or Twitter, or you just stumbled on it because you wanted a really good recipe for butternut squash, thank you for reading, thank you for following along, and, to many of you, thank you for the way you’ve become more than just other bloggers or readers out there. You’ve become my friends, and I appreciate all of you so much.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, all of you. And if you’re out of the country and not celebrating American-style, happy Thursday the 26th of November. May it treat you well, wherever you are.

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Late last week, a food blogger friend of mine Tweeted about a Walmart press release advertising a $20 Thanksgiving dinner. According to the press release, the dinner, which was available starting on November 4, included the following list of ingredients:

• One 12-pound Grade A turkey
• Three 11 to 15.5-ounce cans Green Giant vegetables
• Two 14-ounce cans Ocean Spray cranberry sauce
• Three 6-ounce boxes of Stove Top stuffing
• One 5-pound bag of red potatoes
• One 12-count package of Sara Lee dinner rolls
• One 22-ounce pumpkin roll cake

The Tweet spawned a healthy debate in the Twittersphere, but, even though I’m usually happy to run my mouth in support of all things local, sustainable and organic, I didn’t think I could capture the nuance of my position on this in 140 characters or less.

This is a tough one. I firmly believe that Walmart’s pricing policies—the ones where they force their suppliers to lower and lower and lower their costs year after year, creating an artificial pricing structure and forcing jobs overseas to cut labor costs—are evil. Flat-out evil.

The only way that Walmart can offer such a deal—all that food for so little money—is if they’ve forced their suppliers to cut corners and offer the corporation similarly low prices, or Walmart used this as a loss leader to get people in the door of their stores. Neither of those options are particularly in the spirit of giving and thanks and being a good neighbor. They are Walmart’s brand of business. And I abhor that. I simply abhor it.

But I’m going to be straight up and honest here. It’s not like I never shop at Walmart. In fact, I bought probably 85 percent of my supplies for my trip to Burning Man at the Walmarts in Oakland and in Sparks, NV. The stuff I bought—including my ridiculous Miley Cyrus-brand pleated skirt short enough to shock even me—was cheap, and it didn’t matter if it got ruined in the dust of Black Rock City. I’ve also visited relatives in towns like Keyser, WV, where the Walmart was really the only place to shop for electronics, clothes and other consumer goods. So I can’t be one to cast stones—I don’t think it’s right that there are places in America where Walmart is your only shopping option, but I understand it’s the reality for more Americans than I’d like to count.

There’s another aspect of it, though, that checks me from fully passing judgment on Walmart. It has nothing to do with the company or the stores or the way they do business—I repeat…I abhor the way they do business—but it has to do with the families who might not be able to afford Thanksgiving this year if it weren’t for food banks, and industrial turkeys offered up for sale at Walmart.

At the end of the day, here is what I believe: I believe we have to make radical, dramatic changes to our food system. I believe no one should ever have to eat an industrial, processed, hormone- and antibiotic-laden turkey that might be cheap at the checkout counter but also will cost way more down the line in environmental and health costs. I believe industrial food has made America sick, and we’re only getting sicker. I believe the only way to turn this around is to find ways to make local, sustainably-grown, seasonal, and sometimes organic food available at better prices to people who cannot access nor afford that food right now.

But that work is going to take time. And in the meantime, while plenty of good and thoughtful people in this world are doing that work, I still want everyone in this country to be able to sit down on Thursday and celebrate Thanksgiving. As families. As friends. As neighbors. As a community. And if, to do that, they have to eat a meal that is artificially low-priced due to location or finances, so be it. I can’t, in good conscience, ask them to do anything different.

Here are some resources and ideas for making your Thanksgiving affordable and sustainable this year:

• Mir Kamin of BlogHer has some great tips for celebrating a frugal Thanksgiving.
• Hilary Meyer of the Eating Well Blog has ideas for making Thanksgiving dinner for less than $7 per person.
• Deanna Duke of Relish! asks her readers if sustainable food can be affordable.
• Alison of Discover(ing) Sustainability describes an effort to provide food baskets that contain locally grown or produced food items for the needy in her community–an effort that I applaud!

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The idea behind Drop In & Decorate is this: bake some cookies; gather a group of family, friends, neighbors, or co-workers to decorate the cookies together; and then donate the cookies to a nonprofit agency serving basic human needs in your own community. This program has already touched lives all over the United States and Canada, and before the end of this year, the ten thousandth cookie will be decorated and donated.

If you’d like to host your own Drop In & Decorate event, Pillsbury and Wilton would like to help. Pillsbury has donated 50 VIP coupons, worth $3.00 each, off any Pillsbury product—including sugar cookie mix, icing and flour—to be distributed, first come, first served, while supply lasts, to anyone who plans to host a Drop In & Decorate event (max. 5 coupons per person). And Drop In & Decorate will include a Comfort Grip cookie cutter, donated by Wilton, while their supply lasts.

Write to lydia AT ninecooks DOT com for more info on how to get your free coupons and cookie cutters. And if you need help getting started, visit the Drop In & Decorate website for a free guide with all the information you’ll need to host your party.

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I ended up making two trips to the farmer’s market over the weekend: The first on Friday, to the Old Oakland market, which skews heavily toward stands filled with Asian varieties of herbs and vegetables, and then, on Saturday, to the Grand-Lake market, which offers a bigger variety of sustainable meat, locally grown and pressed olive oil, and a larger selection of everything from greens to stone fruit. But as it turned out, I didn’t need much from that second trip to the market…just some purple basil I picked up at the Capay Farms stand. Everything else, I acquired on Friday.

The first item on my agenda was a main course, and for that, I settled on some fresh wild mushroom ravioli from The Phoenix Pastificio in Berkeley. The woman at the stand recommended it tossed with slow roasted tomatoes, which they had available along with a variety of other sauces, but I remembered I had one last bag of slow-roasted tomatoes stashed in my freezer, the tomatoes purchased from Happy Boy Farms of Watsonville late in the season last year. I declined the sauce and left with only the pasta (and solid plans to thaw my slow-roasted tomatoes as soon as I got home), and a ginger candy offered to me by another one of the booth workers.

Next, I assembled the ingredients for a salad. I’m not going to give you many details here, but am going to use this as an opportunity to announce that, as of July, I am now a contributing editor to BlogHer in the Food & Drink area, and so my Ogen Melon Salad write-up appears over there. But the salad, which featured Ogen melon from Hamada Farms in Kingsburg, Calif.; English cucumber from Wilson Farms in Le Grande; goat’s milk feta from Spring Hill Cheese Co. in Petaluma; and that Capay Farms basil from Vacaville. If you want to learn more, head over to BlogHer and check it out.

I paired all of this with a Bonterra Vineyards Merlot made from organic grapes. Bonterra Vineyards, which is located in Mendocino County, is practicing not just organic farming, but also biodynamic agriculture, which creates something of a closed loop system that nourishes itself without requiring much by way of outside input as the grapes grow and mature. I had plans to wrap up the meal with Scream Sorbet, which is made in Emeryville, which abuts Oakland on its North side. But I got a last-minute invite to watch fireworks in the city and took advantage of that, which sent me off and running before I had a chance to eat dessert. That being said, having some Scream products in the freezer is never a bad thing. I’ll enjoy them this week, for sure.

Did you declare your Food Independence this Fourth of July? What local foods graced your holiday table?

• Golden statue bruschetta
• Roasted fava beans
• How Midwestern I’ve become
• Green is for vegetables
• Grape tomatoes redeem themselves