Have a favorite holiday foodie tradition? Unsurprisingly, I’ve got a bunch. One is planning a really dramatic Christmas dinner for my family, starting to cook at dawn and realizing at 7 p.m. that the food won’t be ready until 11. And everyone’s really hungry. That’s a fun one. Despite that, though, Christmas is definitely my favorite day of the year, followed closely (in both senses) by my birthday two days later.

Before I got the job at Seven Days, I wrote a handful of sensual little “Gastronomic Meditations” and book reviews for a website called The Gilded Fork, now part of the Culinary Media Network. One of them, called “Christmas Cocoa,” was about just such a tradition.

Thanks to my RSS reader, I noticed yesterday that they’ve re-posted the article. It was fun to read something I wrote before I worked as a journalist, and nice that they remembered it.

Even if you don’t feel like delving into my relationship with chocolate, if you’re a fan of sexy food photography, creative recipes and gastronomically themed podcasts, you should definitely give their website a look. 

This article appears in Dec 12-18, 2007.

Former contributor Suzanne Podhaizer is an award-winning food writer (and the first Seven Days food editor) as well as a chef, farmer, and food-systems consultant. She has given talks at the Stone Barns Center for Agriculture's "Poultry School" and its...