Lots of people I know have been active lately, so this is a bonus-length holiday edition full of either stuff from people I know, or at least, suggestions for stuff for people you know. Like this first one:
1. Economist/Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle has an economist-thorough guide to good gifts for cooks at (naturally) various economic levels…
2. …which goes especially well with this Serious Eats thread about worst foodie gifts ever.
3. Of course, one foodie gift no Chicago foodie should be without is the charmingly retro Soup and Bread Cookbook, offshoot of Martha Bayne’s soup nights at The Hideout, including the hummus soup contributed by none other than me (which came in for praise here). Hugh Amano has a post inspired by it as well here.
4. And working our way through old blog-friends at the holidays, Art and Chel Jackson (I’m guessing the former since it’s meat-based) posted a terrific long post on beef, what the different kinds (grain-fed, grass-fed, etc.) are, what the practices of more conscientious producers are, etc. Really a great in-depth look that could easily have been a magazine piece, and yet, thanks to the internet, you can read it for free. (Um, like a magazine piece.)
5. Helen Rosner contributes to this roundup, not of the year’s best cookbooks, but of the decade’s, which strikes me as more interesting in a longer-view kind of way. (Though I think the list is too heavily weighted toward big chef cookbooks— I mean, tell me there aren’t 100 times as many people getting use out of, say, Bakewise or The Perfect Scoop as Alinea or The Fat Duck Cookbook. Still, that’s where the fun comes in, fixing someone else’s list with your own choices….)
6. Need a new Christmas cookie recipe? Here are 25 pretty-looking possibilities, from Recipe Girl. Diet pills to get you wired up enough to bake 25 different kinds of cookies not included.
7. It must be pie week, because The Reader has a cover story on mincemeat pie, its controversial history (involves liquor and prohibition, not to mention murder and nightmares) and why we don’t make it any more (no mystery to me; people don’t have the parts laying around like they used to).  Also in the Reader, Mike Sula has been writing about mangalitsa pork of late; here’s an account by Signature Room chef Pat Sheerin about watching the slaughter (note mention of Sky Full of Bacon video that his brother Mike Sheerin was in partway through).
8. Though if you are the sort to make old school Christmas desserts involving things like suet, you’ve probably already knocked off a few Christmas puddings. So raise the stakes a little with the Imperial War Museum’s recipe for wartime-deprived Christmas pudding.
9. Do we owe it all to shellfish?
10. This has some laughs: