California Central Coast Wine and Food Guide.

We'll start off the month of November with a photo essay on how to properly truss a chicken or turkey. Proper trussing your favorite bird makes a big difference in roasting quality. Just by doing this straight-forward step can make or break a picture-prefect roast bird of any type. With proper trussing, the poultry will bake and brown so much more evenly than an untrussed one. We'll show you how in easy steps.

Now to go with your turkey or chicken, we have the perfect holiday dressing recipe for you. It's a homemade dressing with Golden Delicious apples, golden raisins, mushrooms, sage, thyme.and fresh bread cubes. It's to die for! In fact it's such a tasty dressing, my niece Katie, who's a vegetarian, loves my dressing as her main course!

To go with the big meal, we've got some easy side dishes for you. The first one is caramelized yams. It's so easy--but so delicious- that we like to have them year-round with different meats. The trick to making these common-looking yams so delicious is to technically OVER-bake them until they caramelize internally--no sugars or butters added-or needed!

The next side dish is another recipe simple as they come. Cooked spinach leaves with salt, pepper, a little butter and-the "secret ingredient" ground nutmeg added. It's a whole different taste than what you'd expect. --And it's so simple-but yet complements the other food so well!

The days after "the big day" most people have extra turkey on hand-but what to do with it? We've develop a stellar recipe that we call Turkey Tetrazzini. Though it is a true Tetrazzini, it's lighter than a lot of other tetrazziini recipes. It's so good! It's as good if not better than the holiday meal itself! It works equally well with left over chicken.

On the days before the big meal--or after when you're tired of turkey etc.we've a got a little menu respite for you. It's our Fettuccine with Walnuts and Gorgonzola Cheese Very easy! Very quick to throw together and in its own way, very festive.

Then one of my grandmother's favorite Thanksgiving salads (that can be eaten as a lighter dessert as well) is her old-fashioned "mama-cooking" Strawberry Fruit Salad and Sour Cream Parfait. Made in three layers in a regal glass crown-shaped dish. the layers of fruit and sour cream alternate so that when you dish it out, it's a medley of flavors for your taste buds. When ever I eat it, I'm comforted by its unusual fresh taste and the warm memories of years past. A lot of my relatives still have fond memories of this recipe and mention how beautiful and delicious it was.

So there you have it! What's great about all these recipes is that you can use them year-round with different meat, fish or poultry. They're tasty enough you'll WANT to use them more than once or twice a year, and easy enough you won't groan every time you start to make them.

Happy Thanksgiving!