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With potatoes filling up root cellars right now, we wanted to share a nice potato side dish recipe. Break out your mandoline and get ready for this!

I grew up in the South, but both my parents are Yankees, so it's always been "stuffing" in my family. My Southern neighbors called it "dressing." What about you?

Wine cap mushrooms are found in the spring and fall. They have beautiful cream-colored stems topped with a reddish brown-colored cap. When the mushroom is younger, the cap is shaped like a bell. As the mushroom grows, the cap flattens. The cap can get as large as a dinner plate! However, they're best eaten young, before the gills darken.

Henry David Thoreau urged us to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. Well, I'm here to urge you to suck on roasted bone marrow! Seriously, this is one of the most delicious, low-cost food items you can prepare.

These beautiful, shiny brown nuts start showing up in piles in the fall and winter. I never had chestnuts growing up - they just weren't a staple in my household. The first time I had them was in Paris. As I walked across a bridge crossing the Seine, there was a man with a roasting cart selling hot roasted chestnuts by the bag. I bought a bag and wandered around the streets of Paris peeling of the shells and chewing the sweet nuts.

Omnivore Books on Food is a new bookstore in San Francisco. Housed in a former butcher shop in Noe Valley, they specialize in books about food, particularly vintage and hard-to-find books.

I love it when these meaty, golden yellow mushrooms show up in the Fall at Far West Fungi or the Alemany market. They sprout from September to February, and are profuse since insects and other animals don't like them. More for us!

I know, I know. You're thinking: "Canned duck? Are you kidding me?" But trust me on this one, really. I love keeping a can of duck confit in my pantry, and unlike other foods in cans, it's actually really delicious!

Oden is a hearty Japanese stew that is cooked over several days and commonly served during cold winter months. It's pretty easy to make and most ingredients can be found online or in Japanese supermarkets. It's got a wonderful, savory flavor and contains an odd melange of ingredients like yam, taro, fish cake, hard boiled eggs, and mushrooms. Even though those food combinations might seem odd to Westerners, oden is a delicious dish that should be tried.

Here we are with the weekly food news roundup!

A few years ago, my mother gave me this cookbook that's proven to be indispensable. Called Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie, this collection of 300 recipes and step-by-step techniques is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to make pie.

One thing that San Franciscans look forward to every November is the start of the Dungeness crab season. For many of us, the steaming pots of crab mark the start of the holiday season the way the first snowfall does for New Englanders.

This is the time of the year when fresh olives are showing up at the local farmer's markets in California and any other olive-producing states. I remember my first Fall in California; I saw fresh olives and excitedly grabbed a bag, took them home, and then promptly wondered what to do with them!

At the end of the year, when the petals have long since withered off the roses, bright red berries emerge where the flowers once were. They remain through the fall and in the winter, their color peeking out through snow and frost. Birds and other animals eat them in the winter; so can you.