It's a relief to know that a writer on The New York Times food beat has kids whose tastes don't sound all that much more adventuresome than those of your own children. Given that people are obsessed with food and what the kids are up to, and perhaps more importantly, what the parents are feeding said kids, conversations around food and family have taken on different, arguably absurd, proportions.

While certainly in and of this climate, the writers featured in The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learned to Eat, a new collection of personal essays edited by Bay Area writers Caroline M. Grant and Lisa Catherine Harper (Roost Books), shared the anxieties and joys tied up with all of this stuff by sharing plenty of their own.

Divided into three parts categorized as Food, Family, and Learning To Eat, the stories reinforce how good food and bad food have the power to shape experience, memories, and identity in near equal measure. (But it's definitely preferable if the food is good.)

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Samantha Bonar

Peach Donuts at Donut Man

It's all about doughnuts (or donuts) in the March issue of Saveur, out now on newsstands. The cover promises a list of the world's best inside. But according to features article contributor Michael Krondol, who's working on an upcoming book on the pastries, "though donuts take on countless shapes, textures, and forms around the world, it's in America where these fried cakes came of age."

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Rachael Narins

New England Clam Chowder at Santa Monica Seafood

Today is National New England Clam Chowder Day, which, if you're a Patriots fan, probably couldn't come at a better time. After all, a very good clam chowder can be remarkably comforting, as Ishmael discovered in Moby Dick:

... a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition.

There are other similarly fantastic meditations on food throughout the book (i.e., "The Whale as a Dish"), but if you would prefer not to read Herman Melville's 500+ page tome just for the food-related bits, there are a few other ways to celebrate this great day.

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T. Nguyen

Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes

It's Roald Dahl Day -- yes, every day really ought to be Roald Dahl Day, but today is his actual birthday -- which is just as good of an excuse as any to dive back into his stories. And while you're recalling how often food (and especially candy) showed up in his books to define character (i.e., the B.F.G. and his moral decision to eat awful snozzcumbers rather than "human beans") or to drive a plot (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, of course, but also short stories like Taste and Lamb to the Slaughter), you may as well go on and dig up a copy of Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes. It's probably at your local library, over in the children's section. Because surely you always wanted to borrow from Willy Wonka and make Lickable Wallpaper.

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E. Dwass

Short stories by Elizabeth Berg

Ladies, are your brains too fried from the summer heat to get through a hefty book-club tome? Then put that one aside and instead spend a few days reading Elizabeth Berg's collection of short stories, The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation.

Sorry, guys, we don't mean to exclude you, but Berg usually writes for and about women. Having said that, it's not fair to characterize her as a "chick lit" author, because she's much better than that. It's true that a few of her books might strike some readers as lightweight, but that's not the case here. These stories offer insightful looks at different stages of women's lives. And, in all of them, food is an important element.

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A. Scattergood

Fairies eat and drink in The Enchanted Forest

Last week, a commenter on the "Talk" question boards on the Serious Eats website asked people what their favorite fictional foods are. It turns out many of us have shared strong relationships with the foods in the books we grew up reading.

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julesjulesjules m/Flickr

Oysters

Today would have been M.F.K. Fisher's 104th birthday, an occasion she may have celebrated, as she liked to do, over the course of several days -- today, tomorrow, the next day and all the way up to Bastille Day on July 14. She spent a good portion of her life in France, but grew up in Whittier and lived around L.A. for a few years. In fact, it was at the Los Angeles Public Library where she stumbled upon an Elizabethan cookbook; inspired, she went home and tried her hand at writing culinary essays. And the rest, they might say, is pre-food blogging history.

Food was her subject, but it wasn't her limit. She wrote, for example, How to Cook a Wolf, a wartime cookbook that teaches you less about cooking an actual wolf and more about appreciating the economy in what you have, no matter how small or foie-less. And Consider the Oyster, an ode to the oyster that inspired David Foster Wallace, among others. But we especially like An Alphabet for Gourmets, which uses the alphabet to structure 26 wonderful essays about dining, eating and everything in between, plus one final chapter on the elements of the perfect dinner.

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rhubarb

Felicia Friesema

Pop quiz: If you bought rhubarb in any L.A. grocery store in the past six months, do you know where it came from?

Choose from:

A) Washington state
B) Oregon
C) Holland
D) California

Turn the page for the answer.

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Wikipedia/David Shankbone

Nora Ephron in 2010

Every writer has two or three go-to sources, people who are famous enough for readers to recognize their name, witty enough so they can hold forth on anything and everything, and kind enough to always take your call. Nora Ephron was one of those for me.

Whenever I'd phone, our conversation would always assume the following structure: I'd thank her for making time for me. She'd go, "Pfffffttttttt," like she had nothing better to do. Then I'd ask her questions regarding the subject of whatever story I was writing. Then, just when I was about to hang up and leave her to her day, she'd share a sizzling piece of gossip -- with famous names and everything -- followed by a little bit trash-talking, the glorious kind, the kind that comes out of nowhere and startles you with its blunt incisiveness and makes you laugh out loud.

In between all this -- and they were never long calls, just very action-packed -- she would talk about food: where she'd just eaten, how she preferred to prepare a dish and so on. Anyone who read any of her essay collections -- Scribble, Scribble, Crazy Salad, Wallflower at the Orgy -- knew how interested she was in cooking; Heartburn, her roman a clef about her marriage to Carl Bernstein, was filled with chatty instructions on how to make, say, Lillian Hellman's pot roast or potatoes Anna. She once said that her childhood dream was to be locked up in a bakery.

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Iain Farrell/Flickr

Guinness

Tomorrow is Bloomsday, an annual holiday in which James Joyce fans rejoice and celebrate one of the author's greatest works, Ulysses. For those of you who have never read the book, or only pretended to read it in college, the epic story follows one Leopold Bloom as he goes about his day -- June 16, 1904, to be exact -- in Dublin.

To celebrate Bloomsday 2012, the Hammer Museum will host a Guinness-infused happy hour followed by a "fast-paced presentation of the Aeolus chapter" of the novel, followed by another Guinness-infused happy hour to wind things down. And, because pints of Guinness aren't the only way to celebrate this Irish character, we have a few additional ideas to make Bloomsday your own.

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