Damon Lee Fowler

For twenty years, fully half the time that Savannah, Georgia, was my home, aside from writing cookbooks and traveling to promote them, I also wrote a cooking column for the daily paper. The challenge at the beginning was adjusting to tight deadlines and keeping the copy short and to the point. But that was nothing to the challenge that came a few years in: coming up with fresh ideas and recipes that had not already been done to death. That was especially challenging during the winter holiday season and beginning of a new year.

And then, as if that wasn't enough, I took on running the avocational cooking school of a local kitchenware store. The busiest time there was also the winter holiday season Read More 

In the late seventies and early eighties, the airwaves of public radio were graced with the homespun wit and wisdom of Kim Williams, a naturalist and writer from Missoula, Montana. Her commentary covered just about every aspect of life, but the one that has stayed with me, and is inevitably brought to mind by this time of year, extolled the virtues of joyfully abandoning our self-control for a season of unchecked feasting.

Taking a cue from the oft-quoted beginning of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, "To everything there is a season," she believed that periods of unreserved celebrating were essential Read More 

If your Christmas tree is lying at the curb, the decorations are already packed away, and you've started your New Year's resolution to cut back and lose weight, that's too bad. Because today—not December 26, is the actual end of Christmas—its last hurrah, if you will.

That means we've got at least one more day of Christmas feasting, two if, like me, you let it linger into Epiphany Read More