When most American homecooks think of Chinese food, it’s the kind eaten out or ordered in, not cooked at home. This is partly a function of a pantry not fit for Chinese cooking and partly the intimidation factor. Heating a wok properly, making tasty condiments, folding dumplings; it can all seem like a lot of trouble when a bowl of pasta, just a boiled pot away from the plate, beckons at the end of a long day.If this sounds familiar, might I make a plug for some good Chinese cookbooks?

I recently got hip to a great cream-cheese alternative for bagels and such and was thinking it’d be a nice time to pass on the tip given what a brunch-y time of year this is between Christmas and New Year’s and all the other excuses for gathering and eating. Spreadable goat cheese is a lower-fat form of goat cheese with a looser texture as compared to the chèvre usually sold in log form and usually comes in a tub so it even looks like cream cheese.

Our pie contest may be closed for submissions, but the pie love keeps going for another couple of weeks. Just in time is a new book called The Amish Cook at Home (Andrews McMeel). It’s not a pie book (just a few pie recipes) but it captures the spirit of sharing that pies are all about, and what pie recipes it has are worth sharing here.The author, Lovina Eicher, writes a syndicated column called “The Amish Cook” that she inherited from her mother. She has eight children.

Best Pie Bakeoff Because so many people now cook with a camera around their necks (and eat with one in their laps) we encourage readers to send in photos with their questions and require them to do so for contests. Many are wonderful, but some could use help. Whether or not you plan to participate in the Bakeoff, I thought a little Pie Photography 101 might be useful.By the way, I learned most of these tips from my mother, who is a food stylist and did the styling for my book. Thanks, Mom.

When first encountering David Tanis’s new cookbook, A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes, skeptics might roll their eyes: why do I need a full-color, hard-cover book from a chef who splits his life between the Chez Panisse kitchen in Berkeley and a dinner club in Paris to tell me how to put some figs on a platter? Stop.

Last week in New Orleans at the IACP conference, I met many fellow food writers. One particularly charming author was Amelia Saltsman, who wrote and published The Santa Monica Farmers’ Market Cookbook. We nibbled on debris (the shavings off a freshly carved roast) a po’ boy at Mother’s and talked shop.To keep my carry-on light, I made a promise to myself not to buy anything at the cookbook expo where IACP members were signing books, but I broke it with Amelia’s book.

It keeps happening: discoveries like the one reported on the front page of today’s New York Times (High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi) keep telling us that eating tuna just isn’t a great idea.After being pregnant last year, I all but completely removed it from my diet. But lately, there are some interesting “lower” and “lowest” mercury options out there, which Burrows’s article neglects to discuss.

Bees are all the buzz these days. And for good reason. Their critical contribution to agriculture has long been unknown and unheralded by the public. This fall I had the opportunity to work on the documentary film Silence of the Bees which kicked off the new season of PBS Nature this past Sunday (10/28).

[Beginning this week, we’ll be rerunning some favorites from The Celluloid Pantry while Nora enjoys a writer’s residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts. We’ll be back with all-new posts December 4.] A crisp and delicious gin-based cocktail, the Gibson has a dramatic past. In the 1930s, the magazine illustrator, Charles Dana Gibson stopped in for a drink at the New York Players Club, an elegant social club for people of the theater.

[Welcome to Nina Planck, a friend and author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why. For more of her eyes-wide-opening writing about eating and cooking, visit www.ninaplanck.com]In 1945, nutrition pioneer Weston Price wrote about a mystery nutrient called Activator X. Highly regarded in traditional diets, it was found in the fat (especially butter) of grass-fed animals, and it cured rickets, tooth decay, and seizures. Price found it powerfully effective combined with cod liver oil.