Food Books to Tide You Over When All Your Thanksgiving Leftovers Are Gone

If you unabashedly love food, like cook-to-relax love food and go-on-dates-mostly-so-you-have-an-excuse-to-go-to-new-restaurants love food, Thanksgiving is your holiday (barring any familial hang-ups). It's the one day of the year you can banish any talk of portion size or calorie counts from the table without pissing off your aunt who's on a juice cleanse and won't eat cheese. No one is interested in Rachael Ray's 30-Minute version of Thanksgiving -- time and effort are a sunk cost, and that's expected. There's something incredibly freeing and borderline magical about being able to devote an entire day to cooking and eating in a society that devalues the former and demonizes the latter.

But Thanksgiving is over, and I'll probably spend today inattentively eating a fine-but-mostly-serviceable salad at my desk while I schedule some tweets, indulgent food magic totally tapped out. Luckily for me (and you), there's lots of beautiful food writing out there (um, hi, have you read this piece from Extra Crispy about how strippers do breakfast?), to hold you over until next Thanksgiving, when it's totally acceptable to argue about the relative merits of lard in your pie crust. Below are a few of my favorite super-indulgent or just really, really smart food-focused books.