Every year at Thanksgiving, you're bound to forget one or two critical items. A shallot, cooking twine, mushrooms, Ketel One -- something will slip your mind and you run the risk of having your Thanksgiving dinner collapse in on itself. And then you've ruined everything. Everything! But who can we prevent such yellow wallpapered hysteria? This is where you come in: do you know of any grocery stores that stay open late on Thanksgiving......

We studied the Doña Tomàs cookbook, of the eponymous Oakland Cal-Mexican restaurant, by cooking a few recipes for a dinner party. We tried three, and we can safely say that Thomas Schnetz and Dona Savitsky's batting average with the clumsy home cook is a respectable .667. We had a decent success with the budín de elote, a recipe of which you can find here. It was a fluffy corn pudding with bits of zucchini, light......