Football for a person who likes to cook is an excuse to pull out an arsenal of retro junky recipes. Chile con queso made with Velveeta cheese! Deviled shrimp! Guacamole, chips ’n’ dips galore! Buffalo wings, spicy killer chili with corn bread. I think the only requirements for being appropriate football food is it must be fattening and easy to pick up.

Spend just an hour with Eleanor Whitmore and you know you have met someone extraordinary. Not that she would ever say so. She focuses not on what she has done, but on what she has gotten from the doing. 

Ireland is the only other country I know of that has any special food for Halloween. There’s a famous dish made with potatoes. Dawdling along through my treasured Irish cookbook by the doyenne of Irish cookery, Theodora Fitzgibbon, I came upon some recipes and lore about my favorite Irish dish: colcannon.

Wine labels are highly regulated by the federal government, more methodically even than food labels. It is mandatory to identify in some detail at least seven items, some so boring that it led to the invention of a second label on the back of the bottle to split the tedium and give us a bit of relief and respite while reading the primary label.

My major point in a recent column about storing wines was that there is a difference between keeping wines for up to a few years in a condition where they are ready to drink and aging important wines for the future. Even if you are doing both, serving wines correctly is at least as important as how they were stored.

The rugged canyons and sprawling ranches around Penjamo in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato are haunted with stories of hidden treasure, Catholics fleeing persecution by the Spanish crown, and of revolutionaries like Pancho Villa, who rode through this territory in the early 20th century. Along with these tales, which straddle the line between the historic and the fantastic, are the extraordinary stories of ordinary people who went “al otro lado,” as the people in Penjamo say — to the other side, the United States. 

These savory potatoes could serve as a main course for lunch with just a small green salad to balance their richness. They’re really much too interesting to play second fiddle in a meal. Select large, blemishless Idaho baking potatoes for this dish.

Are you ready for some football? America is. That day of days, Super Bowl Sunday, is upon us and it’s the most-watched television event in the country. So chances are that, wherever you are, some football will be part of your consciousness on February first. 

Casseroles come in so many shapes and sizes and ethnic backgrounds, and with the right ingredients they are splendid for entertaining variable numbers of people and also have the virtue of staying reasonably hot on buffet tables.

Peaches are so delicate and easily bruised, it’s obvious that the beauties from California cannot possibly be tree-ripened. But they are fine for making jams, conserves, and chutneys — anything cooked.

Asparagus are the crocuses of vegetables, the very first edible herald of spring. Of course, like most exotic luxuries, asparagus can be seen in fancy food shops as early as the January white sales.

It is too big, too awful, too otherworldly to comprehend without being surrounded by it. Standing at Ground Zero, breathing the mingled rot of burning chemicals, cooked plastics, and the unspeakable, I realize why it will take months if not years before we can begin to rebuild.

Every day since terror found its targets in New York and Washington and was intercepted by heroism in Pennsylvania, worship services here have drawn hundreds of people, some in business dress, some in beach sandals, parents carrying infants, a few elderly in wheelchairs, and almost all with tears welling.

The gate in the high fence that surrounds the Montauk Coast Guard Station was shut tight on Tuesday morning -- the station's people and the crew of the 87-foot cutter Ridley on high alert like all of this nation's military. Without radio and television, the closed fence would have been about the only indication that something terrible had happened 118 miles to the west.

War news, which increasingly comes in curt briefings from the Pentagon, rivets the country's attention and also serves to distract citizens from what is either a recession or a depression depending on whose ox is being gored. Sales of yellow ribbon may be up around here but nothing much else is. And February. Can't something be done about this wretched month — like shortening it to 10 days?

"The older it is, sourdough fanciers say, the better bread it makes; some Alaskan families have sour­ dough 50 years old." — Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, “Eating in America” 

“By the beginning of the 18th century . . . all the arguments which were to sustain modem vegetarianism were in circulation.” — Keith Thomas, “Man and the Natural World,” 1983

This combination of fresh haricot beans and dried garbanzos (chickpeas) is beautiful, nutritious, and delicious. Even the crankiest of eaters will find nothing to object to.

This amazingly tender and juicy pork roast is the result of cooking at high temperature a relatively short time in a covered Weber grill, and butterflied leg of lamb has been seen on fashionable grills for over 20 years but whole leg of lamb is far less commonplace.

Trout with bacon and vinegar sauce is a sophisticated dinner version of an old-time fisherman's breakfast, while flounder takes on an interesting flavor and appearance when stuffed with herbs.