Julia Child

When the weather is fair, many shops bring food and drink curbside for sales and samples to walkers on the tree-lined stretch. Expect a little of everything, from gourmet hot dogs at Conez & Coneys at one end to turducken roulade at Varanese Restaurant at the other. And if you see a crowd spilling out of the diminutive It's All Greek to Me restaurant, belly dancing is in full swing.  

A marvelous painting of a gourmand at his table hangs in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris -- a portly, pink-faced figure happily gorging on a regal casserole, with a bottle of wine at one elbow and a luscious-looking soufflé at the other. It is traditionally believed to be a portrait of Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, an aristocrat notorious in Napoleonic France for gratifying his palate with the same abandon as his contemporary the Marquis de Sade showed in indulging carnal desires. ...  

"Some Like It Hot" (1959). Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, like Sacha Baron Cohen, won plenty of pre-release publicity for exploring how the other half loves. Shot at a Globe Nod: Billy Wilder's classic brought Globes to Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe and the pic, but their take was sweet, not sour.  

Hastings Entertainment, Inc. HAST announced today a list of Must-Have Christmas Gifts for the 2009 holiday season. Has gift-giving anxiety got you down?  

(CBS) There are a lot of things in life we can do without, but food is not one of them. It's the essential ingredient in our lives. Food sustains us both physically and spiritually, whether it's presented as a simple nourishing potato or as part of an elegant Thanksgiving dinner with family, friends and all the trimmings.  

For nearly 20 years, Mary Ann Esposito of the PBS cooking series "Ciao Italia" has been the major promoter of Italian cooking in the USA, just as Julia Child was to French cooking. Although Mary Ann stands about a foot shorter than Julia, like Julia she's a born educator, always willing to share knowledge and expertise. She possesses a constant curiosity about the origins and the nature of foodstuffs, and has a discriminating palate.  

It's a ritual handed down through the generations you don't think much about until someone pulls out a frighteningly large knife and tells you to slice up a giant fowl — in front of witnesses. That's exactly the situation Brian Barr of Danville found himself in nine years ago after the death of his father, who had inherited the job after the death of his father four years earlier. "I had to do it for the first time that year," Barr says.  

One beautiful day, the town of Chester's Mill, Maine, is sealed off from the rest of the world by a huge dome, as impenetrable as it is inexplicable. Inside the dome, once people have stopped dying from trying to escape, the town is taken over by a bullying local politician and militiaman. CLEAVING:  

The Fox Winter Film series recycles several popular films from the past year, including some fairly recent releases, such as The Informant and Fame, which hit theaters in September. But it also dusts off a few gems from earlier years, such as Earth, said to be a stunning theatrical version of the BBC series Planet Earth, released in 2007, and The Boy in Striped Pajamas, a Holocaust drama that opened in 2008. A large part of the lineup goes to drama.