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It's almost Thanksgiving. For us, that means once again drawing on the expertise of the Chopping Block's Shelley Young.

This is the third year Young has graciously agreed to be the subject of our Thanksgiving video how-tos. The first year, we asked her to show us how to carve a turkey. Last year, it was how to make gravy. And this year, she whizzes us through pie crust. You can check out all the videos here.

There are two reasons why Young's business -- which started in a charming cottage on Webster Avenue in Lincoln Park and has since mushroomed into a grand space in the Merchandise Mart and a Lincoln Square location -- has been around for 12 years. She knows her stuff. And her stuff works.

Sun-Times editor in chief Don Hayner told me he watched and learned from the turkey carving video; he and I both carve our turkeys this way, now.

Young's gravy relies on a simple, easy-to-remember ratio. And her pie crust recipe, she says, is foolproof. Foolproof is a tall order. But watch the video, and then try it yourself - especially if you have a food processor, you're going to be giddy at how ridiculously easy it really is, this crust thing.

So for next Thanksgiving... Shelley, you know the drill.

(And for another take on Thanksgiving duties, here's Anthony Bourdain, another person we love, but for different reasons.)

A chat with my best friend in Kansas happened to coincide with a doctor's revelation that my husband's cholesterol needs to be nudged back into a safe place. Naturally, I headed to the store.

Enough with the bacon and the Sunday steak, I thought. Except that the husband would sooner starve than eat something as mockable as, say, chicken chili, no matter who made it.

That brought me back to thinking about a visit to my Kansas friend's home last year. Ruhe had made a simple dinner in her slow cooker for us -- a chili-baked beans hybrid made with ground bison, homemade biscuits on the side. It was so tasty. It was so Kansas.

Bison, she told me, is the meat of choice in her home. It's markedly lower in fat and cholesterol than beef, chicken or pork. And of course, this being Kansas, bison is widely available in most grocery stores there. Where was I this whole time?

Bison has everything going for it. Why isn't it easier to come by in Chicago? At Whole Foods, fresh ground bison is $7.99 a pound.

Fortunately, Ruhe's recipe is hard to mess up and open to all sorts of interpretation. And the husband? He ate it up.

Roughly:
Brown 1 pound of ground bison (with 1 chopped onion, if you like). Add 1 can each drained black beans, butter beans, kidney beans and lima beans (or any combination thereof). Stir in 1 cup ketchup, 1/2 to 1 cup brown sugar (1 cup verges on one-dimensionally sweet) and a pinch of salt. If you have a slow cooker, let it do its thing; if not, cook in a Dutch oven in a 225-degree oven, stirring occasionally, for a few hours until it smells and tastes good.

Note: Ruhe sometimes subs KC Masterpiece barbecue sauce for the ketchup and brown sugar; other times, she adds curry and peas, a nod to her British-Pakistani heritage.

Putting together this week's story on four Illinois farmers and their favorite Thanksgiving recipes ranks up there as one of my favorites. Vicki Westerhoff, David Cleverdon, Tracey Vowell and Marty Travis -- they are some good eggs, and with fascinating back stories to boot.

They were all gracious enough to share their recipes during what is typically for them a busy, busy time -- and if you don't try Travis' cornbread recipe, you're missing out.

Speaking of, I missed a few resources for local food during the winter months in our listing, but the Local Beet, of course, has me covered.

Here, after the jump, are two more recipes from Cleverdon we didn't have space for in the section that make clever use of squash and greens. The rolls, his great-grandmother's recipe, have been in Cleverdon's family since the late 19th-century.

Could you eat sausage pizza -- and only sausage pizza -- for an entire month?

Craig "Pizza Boy" Scharoff (pictured) could -- or rather, did.

Scharoff entered into a bet with his co-worker, Ron Kaplan, back in September, that he would eat sausage pizza for every meal during the month of October. It was one of those "If you could eat one thing for the rest of your life... " discussions that just took on a life of its own, Kaplan says. "After talking about it for so long, I decided to challenge Craig and everyone here egged him on ... At first, I never thought he could do it but when he ordered that Dominos very early on, I knew I was in trouble."

Kaplan laid out the specifics: sauce and other fillings optional; no pizza variations (e.g. French bread pizza, pizza-flavored Hot Pockets); no salads, side dishes or dessert, and so forth.

Kaplan, conveniently, is one of the moderators of the food chat site, LTHForum, where this whole thing has played out for the past several weeks, with photographic evidence posted by Kaplan of much of Scharoff's intake.

The payoff for all of Scharoff's effort? $2,000.

The twist: Around lunchtime today, Kaplan announced that he and Scharoff have donated the cash to the Northern Illinois Food Bank. And Kaplan is now dusting off an old treadmill to give to Scharoff.

If you're not already sick of Halloween candy -- make that, if you're sick of that waxy, pedestrian, drugstore stuff filled with stabilizers and subpar ingredients -- check out today's story and recipes from Anita Chu's Field Guide to Candy. Better yet, check out the book.

I've been toting around the pocket-sized guide for weeks now like my 4-year-old does her nubby, floppy bear. There were only so many recipes I needed to test for the sake of the story, but now that that's in the can (and I'm off my sugar high), I can scratch my itch for Chu's version of Almond Joys, one of the world's greatest candy bars.

Chow's take on the DIY Halloween candy story, meanwhile, also tackles the Almond Joy as well as the three other big guns in the candy world: Twix, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers. At a glance, Chu's recipe appears more doable. But then, Chow gets points for its printable wrappers and super cool cross-sections of the chocolate bars (which reminds us of how much we love looking at cross-sections of food).

Happy homemade Halloween.

The closing of Gourmet naturally had me considering the relevance of newspaper food sections. Not that I wasn't already. Ads are down, budgets are down, the number of pages are down.

In a conversation I had with Ruth Reichl, the now-defunct magazine's editor-in-chief, I couldn't help but ask for her take on whether what I'm doing (and indeed, what she did at the Los Angeles Times before her restaurant critic years) matters. Here's what she said that didn't make it into today's story:

"One of the things that's incredibly short-sighted on the part of many people who put out newspapers is they feel like if advertising isn't there in the section, it doesn't deserve to live. But if readers are interested, it deserves to live. And there's more indication that readers are more interested now in food than ever before."

We have a cherry pitter. It was a wedding gift and why we even registered for one back then is befuddling now, but we were young and dumb and not very practical.

And yet ... it makes about dozen or so appearances every summer, when cherries are ripe for the eating. Our girls literally squeal at every punch of the handle. Whether it's the actual punch that delights them so or the knowledge that the slowly growing mound of seedless, juicy burgundy orbs will soon be theirs is beside the point. They love the cherry pitter. And we love the cherry pitter.

We had this in mind as we went about today's story on setting up your first kitchen. What do you need -- really need -- to be able to cook decently? You certainly don't need a cherry pitter. You don't need an ergonomic cake cutter, nor do you need about 80 percent of what's in the Williams-Sonoma catalog.

Chris Koetke (below), the dean of Kendall College and a great source for our story, told us he is a knife junkie, with a collection numbering in the hundreds. This was right after we admitted to him we have a drawer jam-packed with barely used gadgets (where the cherry pitter happily resides).

We're conditioned to want more, more, more. In Koetke's view, you need three knives and a sharpening steel. We might even argue that you only need one knife, a pot, a spoon. The rest is icing on the cake.

That said, the cherry pitter isn't going anywhere.

Let's hear it -- what can't you live without in the kitchen, and what won't you ever give up?

By guest blogger and New York writer Seanan Forbes

NEW ORLEANS -- Some foodstuffs come with stories that are as nourishing as a meal. In this economy, tales of unanticipated success are particularly welcome.

Twenty years ago, Loretta Harrison was a medical librarian at Louisiana State University. Then, she learned that Jazzfest needed someone to make New Orleans' most famous candy, pralines. Harrison made a few batches from a family recipe -- and cooked a new life for herself.

In two days at the festival, Harrison and her pralines pulled far more than she was earning in the university library. She shelved the bookish life and opened Loretta's Authentic Pralines, 2101 N. Rampart. When the store's door opened, Harrison became the first black woman to have her own candy company in New Orleans.

Harrison's a born sharer. Come into her store and choose your fill of pralines, cookies and cake, and she's likely to give you the one thing you missed ... just to try. That's kitchen wisdom for you: Sit, rest, eat. People do, and return to do so again and again.

You can get Harrison's well-gotten goods in NoLa or online. If she has her way, before much more time has passed, she'll be on TV and you'll be able to buy her food from a national network.

Harrison worked hard to make her pralines a success story, and she doesn't divulge her recipe. She is, however, happy to provide an insight into what makes a good praline: butter - real butter - and love.

By guest blogger and New York writer Seanan Forbes

There's something intensely satisfying about flatbread. It's not just the snap between the teeth. Some of the satisfaction comes before the stuff hits the table.

It's a terrific base for kitchen play; toppings can make the flatbread as tart, sweet, salty or spicy as you like. It has much of the satisfaction of deep-dish pizza - but it's easier to take flatbread in fat- and calorie-sane portions.

Flatbread is something more readily associated with Europe than with the deep south, but chef Scott Maki of Rambla, 217 Camp St. in New Orleans, is happy to bring all traditions to the plate. One of his most popular flatbreads features homemade fig jam, flecks of Valdeon cheese and hand-torn Serrano ham. Crisp, soft, sweet, salt, fat ... these slim portions are anything but lean on taste and texture.

If you want to bypass the Valdeon buy local, the Green City Market has cheesy options that Lyle Allen, the market's executive director, recommends.

With more than 100 years in the cheese business, Brunkow Cheese of Wisconsin has a fine line of artisan cheeses and a deservedly loyal following.

Goat's milk cheese plays well with figs. On Saturdays at the market, look for Capriole Farmstead Goat Cheese. "Judith Schad is an icon in the cheese world," Allen says. "Her goat cheese is really special."

Saxon Homestead Creamery is new to the Market, and Allen says they use only artisan-crafting methods.

As to the fig jam, Maki has made it with fresh figs and with dried, so this flatbread is in season all year 'round.

Recipe after the jump.

Sad news to start off the week: Sheila Lukins, author of the seminal Silver Palate cookbook, died Sunday of brain cancer.

We had the pleasure of sitting down with the delightfully quirky Lukins back in late November. She was on tour promoting her book, "Ten: All the Foods We Love and 10 Recipes for Each."

The New Yorker, who with her writing and business partner Julee Rosso eased American home cooks into a world of raspberry vinegar, pesto and other then-esoteric ingredients via the pages of the Silver Palate Cookbook, gushed about visiting the Green City Market earlier that day and produce that "would have knocked your socks off." She talked about how frozen peas are a godsend, and that "people were yelling at me because I didn't have a cookie section [in Ten]."

Chances are, you have the Silver Palate on your shelf. Hang on to it. If you don't, at least hang on to the following recipe. Chicken Marbella is a Silver Palate classic, not to mention damn tasty. Thank you, Sheila.

Recipe after the jump.