​When we talked to author Emily Ansara Baines about her recently published book The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook, we asked her about the joys of sourcing squirrel in Los Angeles and about cooking -- and eating -- muskrat. (She suggests substituting chicken for squirrel, unless you're really into that sort of thing, and admits to no great fondness for muskrat.) You can check out recipes for both in Baines' book, as well as, well, more normal recipes, for things like bread and clover-mint tea and Finnick and Annie's wedding cake.

But the one we were really interested in was Baines' recipe for freshly snared barbecued rabbit. Why? Maybe because of a certain 13-year-old girl whose interest in camping revolves solely around rabbit snares, though she has yet to catch an actual rabbit. Maybe because you can get rabbit a lot more easily than squirrel or tree rat. Maybe because rabbit is kind of wonderful: leaner than chicken and a whole lot more flavorful. Maybe because some of us have read M.F.K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf too many times. Or maybe because Easter is just around the corner.

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Katie Stoops

Joan Nathan's Moroccan chicken with olives

​If you're planning to head to Joan Nathan's talk at the Central Library this Saturday, you could do worse than spend the days prior to the event cooking. Specifically, cooking one of the dishes from Nathan's book Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, about which she'll be speaking.

This is a lovely chicken recipe -- turn the page -- from the book, in which a whole chicken is disassembled, rubbed in ras al hanout, and then simmered with whole olives and preserved lemons.

It's easy enough to find all the ingredients these days, and if you have never preserved your own lemons, you might consider it. No, they won't be ready for a few weeks, but it's fun and worth the minimal effort, and they keep for months and months in your refrigerator -- and you'll have them handy for the next time Nathan comes to town.

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Sarah Shatz, Food 52 Cookbook

Beef Cheek Tacos

​At the Novy Ranches grass-fed Angus beef stands that have been popping up at various farmers markets the past few months -- Topanga, Woodland Hills, Sherman Oaks and several others) -- you'll find an assortment of steaks, roasts and ground beef, as well as plenty of "off" cuts like oxtail, beef cheeks, tongue, the heart and liver. (Check back for our interview with the Northern California ranch's feisty -- and charming -- owner, 75-year-old Lowell Novy, a veterinarian turned cattle rancher who went all-out grass fed for both humane and flavor reasons later in life.)

But first, about those "off" cuts. "Have you ever tried eyeball?" asked Jason Yates, who was manning the stand at last Sunday's Brentwood Farmers Market. As a matter of fact, we have not. But we must have looked like the adventurous type (not exceedingly difficult compared to the average Westside farmers market shopper), as a conversation about cooking eyeballs, as well as a whole cow head, followed.

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jgarbee

The Perfect Mushroom

​As we can imagine few things more miserable than stepping foot in any retail store on the busiest shopping day of the year, we will be spending the day after Thanksgiving drafting our holiday baking plan of action. Baking Friday, if you will. Up this year: Buche de Noël.

Home baking frustrations with the French classic rarely stem from the cake recipe, which is essentially a chocolate sponge cake with chocolate filling and dark chocolate ganache frosting. It's those marzipan mushrooms. For starters, they're so dense and saccharine sweet, they don't pair well with such a rich chocolate cake. And by the time you finish sculpting the icing into edible chocolate tree bark, those Black Friday lines sound like more fun than making tiny mushrooms one by one. But what would a holiday forest be without mushrooms? And they're so darn cute.

For professional help (yes, baking frustrations do sometimes require therapy), we turned to L.A. chocolatier and master pastry chef Yvan Valentin, formerly of L'Orangerie fame, who supplies his handmade Buche de Noël cakes to local high-end hotel restaurants (Casa del Mar, L'Ermitage, Andaz West Hollywood among them). Get his mushroom tricks and the easy do-ahead (and tasty) recipe after the jump.

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The Onion's inane "Today Now!" hosts Jim and Tracy welcome celebrity chef Ted Allen (remember when he was on "Queer Eye"?) to show them how to make "some fussy little foodie dishes for you and all your asshole friends." Check out the video if you want to make your own stupid, over-elaborate, fancy-ass meal: a trendy piece of fish coated in some kind of nut you've never heard of with a side of pureed baby something-or-other.

Allen is host of Chopped on Food Network. We only wish you could actually buy his book, Pretentious Foodie Bullshit, in real life. The video is courtesy of The Onion.

A. Scattergood

Evan Funke's tomato pasta

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Making pasta at home isn't difficult. A handful of dough. An Atlas pasta machine. But if you're Rustic Canyon executive chef Evan Funke, who learned the art in Italy and is a Bologna certified chef sfoglino, you mix your pasta by hand, roll it out so thinly that you can see through it, and make the shapes in very specific ways. We recently spent the morning taking lots of pictures of Funke doing precisely that. Here's your pasta-making visual aid, in slideshow form.

Funke has lots of old pasta-making gadgets that he brought back from Italy, where he's pilgrimaging again later this month. He has cutters and presses, gnocchi boards and spring-loaded handmade ravioli stamps and a guitarra from Abruzzo. He has tortellini cutters and a beechwood pasta table (800€ shipping alone) and a birchwood rolling pin handmade for him because his wingspan is so wide. "It makes my job fun," said Funke in the cramped closet that is Rustic Canyon's kitchen. "The texture of hand-rolled pasta is completely different."

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A. Scattergood

Farmshop's cabbage, cucumber & fennel salad

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When we sat down with Farmshop's Jeffrey Cerciello recently, the chef talked about his time with Thomas Keller and in the kitchen of El Bulli. No, Cerciello does not secretly have a nitrogen canister or Anti-Griddle at his Brentwood Country Mart restaurant. (Check out Ink, where you can see the Anti-Griddle sitting on the back counter to the right of the open kitchen.) So when we asked Cerciello for a recipe, he sent us something that a normal person can make at home. For which we are grateful.

It's a lovely recipe for a simple cabbage, cucumber and fennel salad laced with poppy seeds. Farmshop serves it with their Sunday fried chicken -- their own recipe, thank you, not Ad Hoc's, although we all know that is a very good one -- but if you're not a chicken person, we highly recommend it with salmon. Turn the page.

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C. LeVasser

The duo of pots de créme.

​We, and maybe you, continue to spend the majority of our time cooking at home, rather than eating out. Learning how to make things like New Orleans-style boudin blanc, and Sardinian malloreddus, seems to bring us a good bit more joy these days. So today, we continue our experiment with cookbook fights. Last time, we debated the merits of Rick Bayless's jamaica sangria versus Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken's red sangria. This week? We are looking at pots de créme (our French is a little shaky, but we're pretty sure it means "pudding for adults").

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The Mozza Cookbook/Sara Remington

Mozza's meatballs al forno

​When we interviewed Mozza's Nancy Silverton, on the occasion of the release of The Mozza Cookbook, due out next week from Knopf, she talked about the difficulties of adapting restaurant recipes for the home kitchen. Some things need to be adjusted, because not all of us (sadly) have our own enormous Italian gelato machines or giant wood-burning ovens. Mozza's glorious meatballs al forno did not, nor are they difficult to make at home.

The meatballs come in little bowls at the restaurant, atop a bit of the tomato sauce in which they've been braised, with a few slices of grilled semolina toast. They do not come in a sandwich, as Silverton originally wanted, but as an antipasto, and as such are the most popular antipasto at the restaurant. (Of course they are. At pizza-making classes, sometimes the attendees sneak orders of the meatballs, even knowing that they'd get to eat every single pizza Mozza makes. Yes, they're that addictive.) You can always make a sandwich out of them at home if you want. Silverton would doubtless approve. Turn the page for the recipe.

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C. LeVasser

Jamaica sangria by Rick Bayless

​Some of us have been going out a lot less these days. But rather than unnecessarily spending twenty dollars on a rare gueuze at Father's Office, we've been throwing our money at things like Scharffen Berger chocolate, or imported speck from Alto-Adige, to use in our kitchen back home. Sure, cooking can be expensive too -- and a lot more work -- but at least you acquire skills, and leftovers.

So we're trying something new today: cookbook fights. Who makes a better pot de créme: Mark Peel or Suzanne Goin? Who makes a better a better mozzarella sandwich: Nancy Silverton, or Tom Colicchio? For this installment, we're celebrating summer with a little sangria, and pitting Rick Bayless (of the much celebrated, er, maligned, Red O) against the Border Grill duo of Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger. As an added bonus, we will also be providing the winning recipe.

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