Pork

Brandied peaches and spiced crabapples can be found in the specialty foods section of most supermarkets. Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

Serve our Sophisticated Stir-Fried Rice with these irresistible ribs and wash it all down with cold Chinese beer. Buy green tea ice cream and fortune cookies for dessert.

A favorite trick is to stuff the body cavity of the bird with bread stuffing and the neck cavity with the following very highly seasoned sausage meat stuffing.

"The Garden Restaurant in London's Gatwick Airport Hilton hotel serves a pistachio-crusted pork loin in plum sauce that's just delicious," Pete Koronis of Clayton, Missouri. "I'd really like to try making it."

Choucroute is traditionally cooked in champagne but if you wish to be more economical you can cook it in white wine and add a split or two of champagne at the table.

Serve with: Baked sweet potatoes and sautéed Swiss chard. Dessert: Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.

No one seems completely sure where the name Hoppin' John comes from. Variations run from the clearly apocryphal suggestion that this was the name of a waiter at a local restaurant who walked with a limp, to the plausible, a corruption of pois pigeon (pigeon peas in French). Culinary historian Karen Hess in her masterwork, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection, offers a twenty-plus page dissertation on everything from the history of the dish to recipe variations to a number of suggestions for the origin of its name, ranging from Malagasy to ancient Arabic. The only thing that all seem to agree on about Hoppin' John is that the dish is emblematic of South Carolina and is composed of rice and black-eyed peas. Many years back I was amazed to discover a startlingly similar dish on the luncheon table at the Dakar home of Senegalese friends. There, the dish was prepared with beef and not smoked pork, but the rice and black-eyed peas were the same. The name of that dish was given as thiébou niébé. There seem to be two variations on Hoppin' John: One calls for the rice to be cooked with the peas. The second calls for the peas and rice to be cooked separately and then mixed together at a final stage prior to serving. I prefer to cook my rice and peas together.

Coffee beans soften the heat of the chile and bring out the other flavors in this paste-like marinade. You can also use the paste on chicken, as they do at Maroons, where this dish is served. Begin marinating the meat the day before.

This elegant dish would make a lovely entrée for a special-occasion dinner.

"My husband and I went on our first date at Tuscarora Mill in Leesburg, Virginia, more than ten years ago," Jay Lewis of Charlotte, North Carolina. "A few years later, we held the rehearsal dinner for our wedding there. To this day, every time we visit our family in nearby Waterford, we have dinner at Tuscarora Mill. The pork chop with onion marmalade is my favorite entrée." At the restaurant, this dish is sprinkled with candied pecans before serving.

The sauce is a variation of a classic one from the Normandy region of France, where it's made with apples and Calvados.

For hearty appetites allow 1 pound of filet for each guest. Be sure to get whole, not sliced, filet. Ask the butcher to lard the filets for you, or if you have a larding needle you can do it yourself.