One of my favorite desserts to make during the holidays is Chocolate Truffles. They’re super easy and freeze beautifully which means you can make them well-ahead. This version features three flavors perfect for the Thanksgiving table—orange, bourbon and pecan—and packs a lot of pleasure in just a few bites.

Ask an Italian what’s on the menu for the holidays and odds are good there will be fish. A lot of fish. For many Italian families Christmas Eve dinner is synonymous with La Festa dei Sette Pesci, the Feast of Seven Fishes. The feast is thought to be an ancient one originating in Sicily and rooted in the Roman Catholic tradition of abstaining from meat during holy days; another name for the feast, in fact, is La Vigilia, representing the vigil of the birth of Jesus.

I dined on a Mulefoot pork chop at Cochon restaurant in New Orleans with a rush of pleasure, anxiety, and guilt. If this hog breed is endangered, should I be enjoying it so much? I thought. But in truth, the pork is what brought me to the restaurant; by eating the endangered breed, I was actually helping to save it.

The urge to do some serious spring cleaning has hit, and I wondered how many others shared my crazy pantry dilemma. I’d buy something on a whim—a block of belacan (Asian shrimp paste), a bottle of green peppercorns, a stash of fenugreek—then tuck it away in the pantry and forget about it. So I took a survey of Nourish Network readers and Twitter followers and found that a theme emerged: The original inspiration to buy the now-buried-in-the-back-of-the-pantry-item was the desire to stretch in a new culinary direction.