Cookbook shopping? Try one of these

Looking for a cookbook or food book (or drinking book!) to give as a gift? Here are 13 new books I'll suggest:

1. Essential Pepin

By Jacques Pepin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 704 pages, $40)

Jacques Pepin’s career has spanned France to New York, and World War II to digital. With 700 recipes, almost all classic and French, this is a masterwork. With a searchable DVD of techniques.

2. Cooking Light: The Complete Quick Cook

By Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough (Oxmoor House, 352 pages, $29.95)

For the person who wants to eat better and cook better but is overwhelmed by the task. With two experienced authors behind it, this magazine-based project is one of the best home-cooking guides I’ve seen in a while, with pictures, tips, smart thinking and solid recipes.

3. Serious Eats: A Comprehensive Guide to Making & Eating Delicious Food Wherever You Are

By Ed Levine and the editors of seriouseats.com (Clarkson Potter, 368 pages, $27.99)

Give this to a young and eager diner. New York food writer Levine pulled together a smart bunch of young editors to build a great food-obsessed website. Their first book is a guide to obsessive eating from coast to coast (including North Carolina).

4. The Art of Eating Cookbook

By Edward Behr (University of California Press, 296 pages, $39.95)

Edward Behr’s newsletter/magazine The Art of Eating has been a source of smart, sophisticated food writing with a focus on classic cooking for 25 years. Now he’s gone back through all those recipes to put together a collection of essays and recipes that will pull armchair cooks out of their chairs.

5. The PDT Cocktail Book
By Jim Meehan and Chris Gall (Sterling Epicure, 368 pages, $24.95)

Shake it up, baby: The people behind New York’s almost-hidden cocktail bar, PDT (for Please Don’t Tell) have found the middle ground between retro-cool and contemporary in this fun guide to all things alcohol.

6. Basic to Brilliant, Y’All

By Virginia Willis (Ten Speed Press, $35).

I love this concept by Atlanta author Willis: Every recipe includes a variation or a way to dress it up. And thanks to her solid training at La Varenne in France, her recipes bring fresh perspective to basic Southern cooking.

7. Cooking in the Moment

By Andrea Reusing (Clarkson Potter, $35).

Reusing, the chef of Lantern in Chapel Hill, racked up honors this year, including a James Beard medal as Best Chef: Southeast. But there’s no pretension in her book, aimed at home cooks trying to make the best use of locally grown, heirloom foods. She’s not cooking with special chef food – this is the same stuff we get in our own farmers markets.

8. The Homesick Texan Cookbook

By Lisa Fain (Hyperion, $29.99).

Homesick Texan, Fain’s blog about re-creating Texas food when she moved to New York, found a huge following online. A book was the next step. You don’t have to be from Texas to appreciate her sincere, down-home recipes.

9. Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible

By Paula Deen with Melissa Clark (Simon & Schuster, $29.99).

Has anyone since Martha Stewart evoked so much love and venom? But this is a solid book, without too many corny gimmicks. It’s a reminder that at heart, Deen is still a cook from Savannah who knows how to turn out crowd-pleasing food.

10. Cook This Now

By Melissa Clark (Hyperion, $29.99).

Between exploring ingredients in her New York Times column and co-authoring with Paula Deen, Clark was writing her own inventive cookbook, geared to home cooks who aren’t afraid of frisee, quinoa – or good recipes.

11. The Food 52 Cookbook

By Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs (Morrow, $35).

It’s a little high-concept: The website Food52.com aims to create a “food community” by letting members post weekly recipes while other members vote on them. Skip all that and you end up with a solid collection of sophisticated home cooking. That’s much simpler.

12. The Italian Baker

By Carol Field (Ten Speed Press, $35).

After it came out in 1985, “Italian Baker” became a classic, a serious yet approachable guide to bread, pizza, focaccia and sweets. The revision is even better – and ready for a new generation to discover it.

13. Momofuku Milk Bar

By Christina Tosi (Clarkson Potter, $35).

While David Chang’s Momofuku restaurants were taking over New York, his pastry chef, Tosi, was staging her own revolution with desserts so sweet, they verged on sugar obsession. Now Tosi shares the recipes for things like Cereal Milk and the crazy good Crack Pie.

Eating on the fly at Charlotte-Douglas?

If you're traveling during the holidays, the web site Serious Eats has a fun little slide show up, "Airport Food That Doesn't Suck."

It doesn't offer anything really unusual and certainly nothing high-end - One Flew South at Atlanta's Hartsfield didn't make the cut. But the focus here is on fast, cheap and reasonably satisfying, which is usually what most of us need in an airport. And they found picks at both Charlotte-Douglas International Airport and Raleigh-Durham International Airport, which is a nice perk for those flight-delayed days.

Go here to click through their picks. And yes, it's one of those slide shows you have to click through. Which does kind of suck.

One great recipe: Cranberry thighs

It sounds like something you'd call someone the week after Thanksgiving. But cranberry thighs were my solution last week when I needed a pre-holiday meal for a big group. I wanted something that felt like the season but didn't steal the thunder from Thanksgiving the next night.

Since I was feeding a crowd, I stretched the sauce over two big pans of 14 chicken thighs. If you need to cut it down to 8, you'll have some sauce left over. But you can stick it in the freezer and have a head-start for another night. With fresh cranberries making their brief appearance in stores through Christmas, this will be tasty and festive anytime.

Cranberry-Glazed Chicken Thighs

Figure on two chicken thigh per serving.

8 to 12 skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1 (12-ounce) bag fresh cranberries, rinsed and soft ones discarded
1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup ketchup
1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon dry mustard

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Choose a 13-by-9-inch baking dish or roasting pan large enough to hold the thighs in a single layer with a little space between each one. Spray it with nonstick cooking spray.

Sprinkle chicken thighs with salt and pepper and arrange them in the prepared pan or dish. Place in the oven and roast for 25 minutes.

While chicken is roasting, combine the cranberries, sugar and 1/2 cup water in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes, or until the berries start to pop. Remove from heat and stir in the ketchup, brown sugar, vinegar and dry mustard.

Remove chicken thighs from the oven and spoon some of the sauce over each one. Return to oven and roast 20 minutes longer. Spoon a little more sauce over each and turn oven to broil. Broil about 5 minutes, until brown in spots, watching carefully to make sure they don't burn.

Why should you salute the late Jeno Paulucci?

The New York Times had a tribute today to a man who certainly had an influence on American food: Jeno Paulucci, 93, of Duluth, Minn. It seems weirdly appropriate that Mr. Paulucci died on Thanksgiving.

His contributions: First, in 1955, he noticed the burgeoning interest in Chinese food. So he borrowed $2500 from a friend, came up with a formula for canned chow mein, and ended up creating the Chun King brand. He also came up with the Divider-Pak, packaging that kept the crunchy noodles separate from the sauce. He sold it to R.J. Reynolds (yes, here in North Carolina) for $63 million in 1966.

But he wasn't finished yet. Next, he founded Jeno's Inc., making frozen pizzas and snacks. He combined the two to create the pizza roll. After selling it to Pillsbury in in 1985 in $135 million, Jeno's Pizza Rolls were renamed Totino's Pizza Rolls.

And finally? He founded Michelina's, which makes ready-made pasta and Mexican dishes, in the early 1990s. He was still the head of that company when he died.

Read more about Mr. Paulucci's story here in the Times.

Sink your teeth into Thanksgiving

A couple of last developments before I head home to my own range for Thanksgiving:

• Harvest Moon Grille is running a special Thanksgiving market in front of the restaurant at the Dunhill Hotel, 237 N. Tryon St. You can buy bread from locally grown and milled wheat, locally grown vegetables. Days and hours: 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday (Nov. 19), and noon-7 p.m. Monday-Wednesday next week.
• The Ritz-Carlton's Giant Green Gingerbread House goes on display on Thanksgiving in the lobby of the hotel and will stay up until Dec. 28. It's green because it has all organic and natural components, its own LED lights and a green moss roof. If you go by, you can visit the new Bar Cocoa dessert area with Norman Love chocolates.
• Also at the Ritz-Carlton: Holiday teas on Dec. 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17 and 18. Details and reservations: 704-547-2244.

Get your party food ready

Last year, I wrote a column about "Little Black Dresses," those simple recipes for holiday party appetizers that you can always depend on. Some of you were kind enough to send me yours, as well.

This year, I'd love to get even like to run more of them. If you send me an appetizer recipe with no more than 6 ingredients, I'll enter you in a drawing for the cookbook “The Happy Table of Eugene Walter: Southern Spirits in Food and Drink” (UNC Press, $30). The deadline is Dec. 2; send your recipes to kpurvis@charlotteobserver.com.

Photo: Little Black Dress magazine

The best turkey video ever

O Captain, my Captain - you are such a turkey. And I love you for it.

Seriously, William Shatner teams up with State Farm and does his best attempt at the Alton Brown School of Cooking Demos. All to show you the danger of "fire, metal, oil and turkey."