It's persimmon time, and Culinarily Curious gives us a recipe for Persimmon Fruitcake.

From the moment that persimmons hit the market each fall well into the Christmas season, barely a weekend went by without the sweet-spicy smell of persimmon cake wafting from the oven as it baked.

Gift guides can be found all over the blogworld these days, and a couple of local bloggers have created their own guides. The Ethicurean crew helps us focus on Shopping Local First, and suggests many ecologically conscious gift ideas, and on 101 Cookbooks, Heidi brings us another installment in her several-year gift guide.

Garrett at Vanilla Garlic interviewed Guy Fieri, winner of The Next Food Network Star. Guy is opening a restaurant in Sacramento.

Tex Wasabi's will be opening up on Arden, east of Howe and will bring some definite fun to the Sacramento dining scene. It also plans to shake up and all preconceived restaurant conceptions you had when you hear is genre: California style sushi and Southern BBQ.

What's the difference between a pumpkin and a squash? Click on over to World on a Plate as Jeanne tells us all we need to know.

Part of the confusion can be cleared up with the definition, pumpkin really only means "large hard-skinned squash." Beyond this the meaning is mostly arrived at by cultural usage of the term. What is considered a pumpkin changes as you travel around the globe and also regionally. Here in the U.S. pumpkin typically refers to the rounded orange squash of any size that is carved for Halloween or pureed for Thanksgiving pie. Bottom line...pumpkins are a type of winter squash.

In an entertaining post, Cookiecrumb defends the lowly casserole and charges us all to dig out our casserole dishes and add some recipes to our repertoires.

I still have my Corning Ware dish with the blue flowers. Not even Saveur managed to scrounge up one of those icons for their photo spread. And if you must know, I got the Corning Ware as a gift for starting a bank account. Back when banks gave gifts. It's that old.

Sara at Exploring the Silver Spoon is cooking her way through the Silver Spoon Cookbook and her reviews are inspiring me to pull that cookbook off my shelf and give it a glance. Most recently, Sara reviewed the delicious-looking Broiled Eggplant recipe.