Recipe

The chef's knife and the artist's pen figure equally in cooking up "Cheap Thrills Cuisine," a cartoon strip that makes its debut today in A La Carte.The strip is a collaboration between two Canadians, chef Bill Lombardi and his friend and former next-door neighbor, artist and illustrator Thach Bui."Thach kind of got the idea of dropping a recipe into a cartoon," Mr. Lombardi says. The strip first appeared in an underground paper in Toronto. Last year it was picked up by the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates it in more than 45 papers.

The best soft crabs in the world are, of course, found right here in Maryland. But the second best can be found down in Louisiana where chef Emeril Lagasse covers his Gulf Coast soft crabs with nuts.I ate these crunchy crabs during a visit to New Orleans several years ago. They were so good I considered changing my legal residence from Maryland to a table in Emeril's restaurant.Recently, when I got my hands on "Emeril's New Orleans Cooking" (William Morrow, $23) I immediately turned to the index and looked under "crabs."

Dorothy Ruth of Baltimore sent out a call for help that has now been answered. "Help!" she wrote, "I need a recipe for rum buns made with yeast dough. My sister is bugging me to make them."Sandra K. Hayslett of Olney responded with a recipe and a message. "In the 1960s and 1970s, my husband and I used to visit the Flagship Restaurant in Washington, D.C., an excellent seafood restaurant. As a specialty, a luscious, warm rum bun drizzled with a warm rum-flavored icing was served alongside the meal.

It's hard to imagine enjoying the winter holidays without cookies. Yet with so much to do, it's sometimes hard to squeeze in time to bake as well. So for our annual cookie exchange at The Sun this year, we decided to make every cookie count. We went looking for two kinds of cookies to meet the most pressing demands of the season: cookies that can be made fast and those fancy enough to give to friends or put on the party table. We received more than 100 recipes and many of them were so tasty or clever it was hard to choose just a dozen.

I have several recipes that call for Oriental black beans. Can I substitute canned Latin black beans instead? Are they the same bean? Asian black beans. Latin black beans. What's next? North Pole black beans? The fact that, yes, you can substitute Latin black beans for Oriental black beans, doesn't mean that they are the same thing. In fact, Asian black beans are soybeans that have normally been fermented and preserved in salt. In China, they are known as chi, and there is evidence that they have been used there as early as the second century B.C. These Chinese black beans have a very strong, salty flavor and are usually soaked in cold water before being added to a recipe.

Nowadays, it is a rare treat to see the word coddies on a menu, but not so long ago this uniquely Baltimore food was as close as your corner store, malt shop or confectionery. Coddies are not to be confused with cod cakes. While recipes for coddies vary, a coddie can be best described as a hand-formed, gently seasoned mashed-potato-and-cracker mixture that is always deep-fried and traditionally served between two saltine crackers topped with yellow mustard. It contains little or no cod. Served at room temperature, today's coddies are made slightly larger than in the past, hanging over the sides of the saltines by one-half inch all around.

Is that fresh pear or city chartreuse?" asks Jerry Edwards, as he paces about the Woman's Industrial Exchange. It's a few days before the Baltimore landmark's restaurant reopens under Edwards' management and the chef appears rather dazed by a vibrant green color his in-house designer, Travis Lee Moore, selected for what were the restaurant's formerly gray walls. "We were dying when Travis first put it up," Edwards says with a smile. "But we needed a color attack here." Attack is a favorite word of his; infuse is another.

The holidays, no matter how joyful, always bring a bit of stress - standing in store lines, searching for parking spaces, watching the diminishing bank account and mounting credit-card debt. But gifts made in the kitchen are worth more than the cost of their ingredients. Homemade breads, chutneys, candies, cakes and cookies convey a warmth and care no store-bought present can. And, often they come with stories and memories more sweet than the sugar that flavors them. That was true with many of the recipes that readers sent us when we asked for their favorite food gifts.

Many of my friends love to cook and entertain as much as I do, and so they often stop me in the market to tell me when a recipe they have tried has been a particular success. Without fail, they offer to share the recipe, encouraging me to try their latest discovery. For example, a few weeks ago one of my neighbors approached me to describe the Congo Bars she had baked several times that month. "They're so easy I can whip them up in less than an hour, and everyone I've served them to has asked for the recipe," she announced.

I'll cook from scratch, said the new bride, lying. She made beef stroganoff -- her husband's favorite -- from a mix. He told her he loved it; she hid the empty packets in the trash.Then her grocery store in Texas ran out of beef stroganoff mix."Please help me," the working woman pleaded into the phone. "Where can I find it?"Hundreds of miles away, in suburban Baltimore, in the teal-carpeted corporate office of the spice company that made the mix, a woman was listening. A woman who would prefer not to show you her face, or share her age, or dwell in any way on the gentle and generous manner in which she responds to people's questions about her company's products.