sunday morning breakfast links: 12/27/09

• Catching up on some food-blog reading I found that Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini had answered my plea for awesome spaghetti squash recipes before I even uttered it--here's her recipe for a spaghetti squash gratin, embedded in a post that includes a half-dozen other mouthwatering suggestions. I'll be trying at least one and probably several of these very soon.

• From the inimitable (believe me, I've tried) New York Times science writer Natalie Angier, an article arguing that vegans aren't exempt from the ethical dilemmas involved in killing other living things for food. Okay, so her piece is tangential at best to the project of home cooking, but it's a fascinating romp (really!) through the biology of plant defense and you should click over and read it and marvel at the pageant of life on our planet.

• While we're geeking out, another Times science piece, reporting on the excavation of an 800,000-year-old hominid dwelling that suggests we had kitchens even before we were fully human.

• From the American Prospect archives, a kind of flip side of the Hanna Rosin piece I linked to last week: Noy Thrupkaew argues that there's a kind of unarticulated anti-feminist undercurrent to some of the recent calls to revive the art of home cookery. I found myself nodding right along with this piece too.