If you announced to a Northerner and a Southerner that your salad had congealed, one would look at you with pity, and the other would know that dinner was ready.

It's hard to pick an all-time favorite cookbook, but if I had to, it would be Paula Wolfert's 2003 "The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen." The recipes for Moroccan fish with sweet onion jam or flatbread stuffed with cheese, squash and wild greens are tempting and satisfying. Most important, they work.

Heather Shorter inherited more than her grandmother's passion for pickling. She also got all the equipment: a giant kettle, a case and a half of Mason jars, bands and lids, and a dog-eared copy of "Ball Blue Book of Preserving," complete with recipe notes in the margins.

Digesting the sum total of Chris Fair's new "Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States" (Lyons Press, 2008, $24.95) is a bit like buying a sales pitch from that classic "Saturday Night Live" sketch: It's a dessert topping and a floor wax, which is to say that it involves an improbable...

This summer and fall, In Season columnist Stephanie Witt Sedgwick is sharing her experiences as a member of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. CSA members pay in advance for a weekly delivery or pickup of produce and other fresh items from a local farm.

The Food section's annual cooking class listings will run in mid-September. Deadline for submissions is Friday. Instructors, please fill out an online form at http://cookingclasses.washpost.com . Alternatively, send the following information in the order listed to Food section, Cooking Class...

· MIDDLE EASTERN FOOD FESTIVAL: Features food, pastries, beer and wine. Free admission. Saturday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 6 p.m. Holy Transfiguration Melkite Greek-Catholic Church, 8501 Lewinsville Rd., McLean. 703-734-9566 or http://www.holytransfiguration.org .

If you're a young chef applying for a restaurant job, getting a nod from Frank Ruta, the chef-owner at Palena in Cleveland Park, might mean getting to skip auditions. Just ask Eric McKamey, who came aboard Etrusco (1606 20th St. NW; 202-667-0047) in Dupont Circle after having met its owner, Vince...

A Seattle-based chain embarks on an aggressive plan to buy up smaller regional outfits in other parts of the country and take over their locations. No, not Starbucks: That was last decade. This time it's Organic to Go, which is turning all four High Noons and one Marvelous Market in the Washington...

RETURNING ENGAGEMENT: Everything old is new again at the Westin Embassy Row (2100 Massachusetts Ave. NW), which expects to revive the Jockey Club restaurant, shuttered in 2001 after a 40-year run, in mid-October.

I tried a version of this colorful dish years ago at August, a restaurant in Greenwich Village in New York. It included skordalia, a garlicky sauce with cooked potatoes and nuts; I substitute a simpler tzatziki, or garlicky yogurt sauce.

One year shy of 180, D.G. Yuengling and Son Inc. in Pottsville, Pa., is the oldest continuously operating beermaker in the United States. Depending on your definition of "brewery," Yuengling might soon boast another distinction: the largest brewery that's 100 percent U.S.-owned.

You might be wondering why, if Napa is America's ne plus ultra in technically pampered wines, flinty-eyed marketing and Type-A price pointing, some in the region are paying much attention to organically grown grapes. Why are they replacing Roundup herbicide with "teas" of yucca, nettles and herbs,...

Wine columnists Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg are away this week and will return next week.

2006 Napa Wine Co. Sauvignon Blanc ($16): pale, bright, some grass on the nose, balanced, with full flavor and a crisp finish. 14.4 percent alcohol.

In addition to the "Ball Blue Book of Preserving," Heather Shorter recommends Linda Ziedrich's "The Joy of Pickling" and Carol Costenbader's "Preserving the Harvest."