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Ashley Strickland is an associate producer with CNN.com. She likes sharing green soup, cajoling recipes from athletes and studying up on food holidays.

There’s something addictive about that moment when you hand someone a homemade treat and their face lights up like you’ve just given them a hug. It turns baking into therapy, food into an olive branch, and those you share it with into a family.

I’ve experienced that joy for many years, by virtue of being the delivery girl every winter. I may have switched from wearing hair bows and Christmas dresses to newsboy caps and tall boots, but that feeling stays the same, and I always come bearing gifts.
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Sink your teeth into today's top stories from around the globe.

• Celebrating the dying art of the 3-by-5-inch recipe card. - Slate

• How a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey captured the heart of America. - CHOW

• Your morning mocha is dictating what you want for breakfast. - Beverage Industry

• Honey retailers are attempting to make the standards of business a little less sticky. - NPR

• Edith Floyd is turning Detroit's food desert into an urban farm, one plot at a time. - Grist

Making good sushi depends on a number of things, but for Silla Bjerrum, founder of British restaurant chain Feng Sushi, where her ingredients come from is key.

“I serve a lot of fish. I buy a lot of fish,” she explains. “Ten percent of my turnover is spent on buying fish, so I think I have a duty of care to the fish and the people who eat the fish.”

Each year the award-winning chef teaches small groups of enthusiastic foodies traditional and not-so-traditional sushi-making skills in one of her London restaurants.

From maki rolls to  more daring “inside-out” rolls, she offers helpful tips to like how to wash sushi rice (at least 10 to 12 times!) and how covering your sushi-rolling mat in plastic wrap will make it easier to clean up later.
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While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday.

If it hasn't been frosty enough for you outside, enjoy a scoop or two of life's simplest and sweetest frozen dessert– December 13 is National Vanilla Ice Cream Day!

In the history of ice cream making, snow is often the culprit cited for creating or inspiring the frozen treat. Marco Polo is credited with taking the technique of making ice cream to Italy after his visit to China.

When Catherine de' Medici married the duc d'Orleans in 1533, she brought Italian chefs to France with her who would be able to make her "flavored ice." In the 1630s, King Charles I gave his personal ice cream maker a lifetime pension to keep his "frozen snow" recipe a secret so it could remain a royal treat.
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