"Wait - there's an actual recipe for this?"

My husband Douglas paused his furious stirring and spun around from his post at the stove. I pointed to the book his mother, now resting in the front room, had left spread open and bookmarked on her kitchen table.

"Well yeah," I said. "Isn't this what you're using? Onion, cornbread, celery, the egg? It's the same dressing you make for Thanksgiving, and this recipe is pretty much it, right?"
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Sink your teeth into today's top stories from around the globe.

• Luck may be a lady tonight, but on New Year's, it's in the Hoppin' John. - Gilt Taste

• A restaurant in Turkey takes a page from the ol' "freedom fries" book by losing its French name after strained relations between the two countries. - Hurriyet Daily News

• Bacteria in pre-ground meat just got a whole lot scarier thanks to the FDA. - New York Times

• There's wood powder in your cheese, mice in your energy drinks and jiggle in your Jell-O. Plus, nine other important lessons from the year's top food stories. - Gizmodo

• Emergency energy boosts are coming soon to a nostril near you. - NPR

Products in Japanese convenience stores come and go at a bewildering velocity. One day you find the greatest canned coffee of all time and then, a week later, it’s gone forever.

The existence of these products is often so brief they almost completely fail to enter our collective memories or get tangled in the branches of the Internet.

We step into the local convenience store - or the one right across the street from that one - and select the latest and oddest products we can find.

The results aren't always pretty, but the write-ups are crucial for capturing the ephemeral nature of Japan’s consumer culture.

The remaining question is why Japanese companies spend so much time and money developing products that are likely to disappear within a few weeks.

Read "Snack Nation: Japan's obsession with weird and wonderful pocket-money delights" on CNNGo.
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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.

We're milking today for all it's worth - December 28 is National Chocolate Candy Day!

It's impossible to have a bad day when chocolate is on the menu, especially melt-in-your-mouth candy that comes in oh so many flavors and forms.

Candy was pretty popular in the 1800s (how could it not be?) and if you had a sugar craving, you could cure it by going to a general store or candy shop and scooping up a giant bag of whatever your heart desired ... except for chocolate. Our predecessors were rather attached to it as a beverage or rich dessert. But when the public began to clamor for chocolate candy, the chocolate bar was born.
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Consider the daily Coffee Klatsch post as your VIP lounge – the primary comments thread for readers who'd like to chat about topics not related to the articles we're running. That way, everyone knows where to find each other, and each post's comments section remains on topic.
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