My family counts on me bringing something different to our holiday meals. My pot stickers (which an old farm woman taught me to make in her outdoor kitchen when I was in China) are a favorite, but they aren't new and exciting anymore. I've talked about that woman's outdoor kitchen so often my daughter put one on the side of the house she designed for me.

Hopefully, purple sweet potato pie will keep my reputation intact. My son-in-law loves my candied pecans, so I'm going to use your whipped cream recipe too and make SIL his jar of candied pecans at the same time.

I can't remember ever being in a Whole Foods, but their website had a big 0 when I searched for ham hocks to see what they had to offer. Ham hocks from grocery stores, including Walmart, are very small, very fatty and any meat on them is full of gristle and so tough, I suspect they are flavored, rather than long-smoked.

Any recipe that calls for ham hocks, is after the long-smoked flavors absorbed by big, meaty ham hocks. Fat, skin and bones, do not absorb the smoky flavor the way meat does, so you won't get that flavour out of grocery store hocks.

Unless you can find big ole meaty ham hocks, I suggest you make your stock with smoked turkey legs. Its not as good as ham hocks, but it's still good. Besides, ham hocks are in such short supply, most people can't tell the difference. Around 5:00 p.m., I put smoked turkey legs or ham hocks in my large crock pot, cover them with water, no spices at all, and leave the pot on low overnight. In the morning, I strain the stock and pick the meat off by hand. Cooking green beans, root vegetables, or dried beans in that stock makes for amazing flavour.

When I lived in California, the only place I found real ham hocks, like we're talking about, was at a butcher shop in Oildale which is near some hog farms. To stock my freezer, I used to drive down the mountain, then down the valley to buy a load of hocks. My friends used to buy their ham hocks from my freezer, which reminds me, do not - I repeat do not - go to Oildale. Oildale is still KKK land and full of really awful, blood thirsty, violent racists - scary, scary place.