Raspberry Pistachio Cheesecake from John Barricelli of the SoNo Baking Company

            Just before Thanksgiving, Andrew heard from a friend from his college days requesting a dessert recipe using raspberries.  Well it took all of two minutes to remember a spectacular cheesecake he made earlier in the season.  But why it has never made an appearance on these pages is a bit of a puzzle.  The cake is the essence of what a truly great cheesecake should taste like--extremely, densely creamy with that wonderful tang from the touch of sour cream that’s added to the batter.  But in this version there’s so much more...a pistachio-flavored graham cracker crust, more pistachios ringing the cake and topping the whole thing off, a layer of brilliant red raspberries.  In planning our offerings for the dash from Thanksgiving to Christmas, I wanted to give our readers some easy weeknight meals and also to give some ideas for fantastic desserts for all the entertaining that happens this season. It was a no-brainer to include this phenomenal cake because it even looks like Christmas with it’s red and green coloration.  Raspberries, while hardly in season, are one of those fruits that are increasingly found year ‘round so it shouldn’t be too difficult to pull off this.  And oh what a response you can expect when the first bite puts everyone’s taste buds into high gear.  And the surprising thing is Andrew says it's not at all hard to make, it just looks it! 

Skillet Lemon Chicken with Spinach and Fingerling Potatoes and Spinach from Nathalie Dupree's "Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking"

         Nathalie Dupree has just published “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking” (Gibbs Smith 2012), an immense compendium of Southern cuisine, which runs 720 pages and contains some 650 recipes. Amazingly, Nathalie writes in her introduction that 300 pages and 100 photographs never saw the light of day.  It is a beautifully written book, a collaboration with her former TV show producer, Cynthia Graubart. Its title is an homage to Julia Child who encouraged Ms. Dupree to write and teach the moment the two met at the Cordon Bleu in London in 1971.  Several years later, Nathalie took Julia’s advice to heart and first opened her own cooking school 40 miles outside of Atlanta or “midway between Social Circle and Covington, Georgia across from the Tri-County Cattle Auction Barn and Hub Junction”, Nathalie writes.  Soon she was lured to Rich’s, Atlanta’s famous and now defunct department store, to teach in their downtown store.