Cookbook

Timing is everything, and cookbook author Beatrice Ojakangas might have the best in the business. Her latest cookbook - her 26th, an astounding record - could not have landed in bookstores at a more opportune moment. After all, when the economy slows down, out comes the Pyrex. In The Best Casserole Cookbook Ever (Chronicle, $24.95), Ojakangas has found all kinds of ingenious ways - more than 500, actually - to say "baked-in-a-dish" and still mean casserole: Gratin. Strada.

Coatesville will be cooking on June 16. Food lovers can indulge in a smorgasbord of international cuisine at the first Ethnic Food Festival on the grounds of City Hall. The event is being sponsored by the city's Main Street program and the Coatesville Rotary Club. "Since this is our first one, we are kind of learning and experimenting as we go along," said Diane Bernardo, manager of the Main Street program. Bernardo said her program was a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving, revitalizing and assisting businesses in Coatesville.

Byko's Birthday Book Pennsylvania Ballet co-dancer Christopher Roman leaps into 27; Pennsylvania Ballet co-dancer Kelly Moriarty pirouettes 30. Oprah Winfrey? She looks like she enjoys a good meal. We might buy her cookbook. Linda McCartney? Well, we might invite a vegetarian over for dinner one night, so, sure, we'd buy her cookbook. But a Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis cookbook? We don't think so. Don't you imagine that the famously svelte Jackie O dined on a few limp leaves of iceberg lettuce, washed down with a few drops of consomme?

Julian J. Aresty, 92, a philanthropist whose family was particularly supportive of the University of Pennsylvania, died Tuesday at the Medical Center at Princeton from complications following a heart attack. He had resided in Princeton Borough for the last 30 years and previously resided in Trenton. He was born in Monastir, Macedonia, now Bitole, and later settled in Rochester, N.Y. Mr. Aresty was a co-owner of S.P. Dunham & Co., Central Jersey's leading department store with four locations.

"To touch is to know! Children learn best by doing!" says the forward of "Please Cook with Children," a cookbook put out by the Please Touch Museum that brings the museum's philosophy into the kitchen at home. More than 70 nutritious, interesting and relatively simple recipes become projects for adults and children to tackle together for any meal of the day. The kitchen is a laboratory for experimenting and learning and a great place for parent-guided activities. Helping to prepare treats such as "Popover Pancake," "Broccoli No-Crust Quiche," "A Philly Pretzel," and "Peanut Butter Bread," children learn basic skills about following directions, measuring, and preparing foods.

ARE YOU a fantastic home cook or do you know one? We think great dishes are being served in kitchens around the Delaware Valley. While we love our celebrity chefs, we want to celebrate the home cooks who serve a great meal without a prep person, dishwasher or exotically stocked walk-in refrigerator. Every month, "Top Cooks" will spotlight a home-cooking whiz and one of their recipes. Tell us about your Top Cook, their signature dish and how they work it in the kitchen. Featured cooks also will receive a cookbook or other prize for participating.

It was a banner year for Philadelphia's Book and the Cook, the event that has become known to participating chefs and cookbook authors across the country simply as "The Party. " Participating restaurants grossed more than $1 million for the first time in the 13 years of the Book and the Cook. Cookbook sales exceeded those in past years as well. From a pre-event benefit for the Restaurant School on March 8 through Saturday's gala at 30th Street Station honoring Giuliano Bugialli, the Toque Award winner and renowned Italian cookbook author, down to the last dinner Sunday night with author Colman Andrews at Napoleon, authors and chefs played to enthusiastic and often packed houses.

"Married . . . With Children" seems an unlikely basis for a cookbook, but that's what "Pig Out with Peg" is . . . sort of. Columbia Pictures Television Series has published this X-rated cookbook, which is full of the now-familiar vulgarity that characterizes the Bundy clan on the Fox Network series "Married . . . With Children. " Its recipe titles - "Bitch Cake," "Smoke Alarm Steak" and "Chernobyl Chicken Meltdown Sandwich" - insure it will never be confused with "The Joy of Cooking.

Modernist cooking - call it "molecular gastronomy" only if you're willing to suffer the wrath of its pricklier practitioners - is gaining favor with more and more chefs who see value in the cuisine's vacuum sealers, water baths, and dehydrators. Home cooks, by contrast, happily cling to the classic techniques. Several factors play into the modernist movement's low impact with us house-bound hash slingers, costs and degree of difficulty prime among them. But as scientist-turned-cookbook-author Nathan Myhrvold recently noted, home cooks have long been at a disadvantage, too. They haven't had many resources to explain, in the necessary depth and detail, all the tools, gels, powders, and processes behind modernist cooking.

There is no sin except stupidity. - Oscar Wilde So, this is where all the sinners converge come Christmas. In Macy's, at Herald Square, the world's largest department store, the vortex of holiday anxiety nervosa. You have to be a little screwy to come in here and shop. More than 45 acres sounds large until you realize that 50,000 to 75,000 people come here every day between Thanksgiving and Christmas. On this day, it feels like each and every one of those 75,000 is standing next to us in Guy Sock World.