By Matthew Yglesias

I’d never really considered the question of how to eat a chicken wing to be a problematic one; it’s not like a lobster or a crab or something. But this video opened my eyes to the existing of elegant wing-consuming possibilities that I’d never really considered:

I’ve never tried to make buffalo wings but it sounds pretty easy.

By Ben Miller

One thing that surprised me about this week’s episode of Top Chef was that the fourth judge ended up being Jerome Bocuse and not Thomas Keller who had made a special visit to the kitchen earlier in the show. Turns out, as Tom Colicchio notes on his Bravo blog, Keller’s basically too much of a nice guy to sink to the snarky lows (cough, Padma, cough) often seen at Judges’ Table:

One more note:  You may have noticed that Thomas Keller was at the meal but did not participate at the Judges’ Table. We tried to convince him to be there, but he decided against it, citing that he didn’t want to have to be negative towards the contestants.

Also, did anyone else notice Tom guffawing at the very end of the episode after something I believe it was Kevin said? It’s hidden in the back right of the frame while he’s shaking hands with the judges.

By Kay Steiger

by Flickr user benfRank: photography & design (Creative Commons license)

Ben Frank has his very own recipe for butternut squash lasagana. This photo, as usual, comes from the IFA Food Porn photo pool.

By Sara Mead

The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss has had some good school meets food blogging this week. Today, she’s investigating the Department of Agriculture’s list of “foods of minimal nutritional value,” which schools participating in the school lunch program may not allow to be sold on school premises during school lunch or breakfast hours. It’s a pretty random list, barring the sale of some items, such as carbonated water (as part of a larger soda/pop ban) and gum, that are neither bad for kids nor substitutes for more nutritious food, while permitting the sale of an awful lot of high-calorie, high-fat, low-nutrition junk.

Earlier in the week, Strauss bemoaned the high sugar content–more than kids should eat in an entire day–in many district-provided school breakfasts. This is a good illustration of why I’m impatient with Alice Waters-style  efforts to upgrade the school lunch program with more organic, locally raised, and home cooked food. The bar some school lunch reformers want to set is so, so far away from where we are now, and I worry that it distracts from simpler, more realistic, and more affordable ways to really improve the nutritional content of what kids are getting in school.

A really sugary school breakfast is not good for kids. It hypes them up first thing in the morning, then leads to a mid-morning crash, neither of which is good for teaching and learning. Sugary cereals also have negative dental implications for low-income kids who may not have access to regular dental care. Kids should be getting complex carbs and protein at breakfast, not a ton of sugar. But reducing the sugar content and upping the protein and complex carbs in school breakfast has nothing to do with organic and local ingredients or on-site preparation.  Simply substituting the sugary cereal with a higher fiber, lower sugar generic boxed cereal, or instant oatmeal, would be a world of improvement. Replacing orange juice with milk, water, fresh oranges, or even canned fruit cups in light syrup would also be an improvement. Donuts and pop tarts should not be sold during school breakfast. Period. Doing any of these things would probably cost a bit more money than we currently spend, but would likely pay off in improved student attention and learning, and is much less of a stretch than what some school lunch reformers are asking for.

By Spencer Ackerman

The harmony of this blog was interrupted last year by Thanksgiving discord, as Yglesias and I took the proper anti-turkey position and Miller good-naturedly but mistakenly defended tradition. Choire Sicha’s instructions for barbecuing a turkey — reminiscent as they are of Kriston Capps’ penchant for smoking the bird — are almost enough to convert me. There is, however, this generous concession:

Shove the thing on the table. Let it sit there smoldering for 20 minutes. Make someone cut it. The outermost inch of the turkey will taste like BACON. It will taste like eating a wood fire—go figure! It will be like biting down on the forests of Chernobyl. You will pretty much regret ever having done this.

Turkey. It just shouldn’t be consumed.

By Kay Steiger

by Flickr user sjgourmet (Creative Commons license)

These caramel apples look pretty nice! This photo, as usual, comes from the IFA Food Porn photo pool.

by Kriston Capps

All these nice District-area food bloggers have called for an assembly, a gathering of Internet food associates, if you will, a happy hour, at ChurchKey, which basically everyone agrees is the cat’s pajamas.

Two things about ChurchKey. Well, three: Go to this happy hour. But two other things. Despite the fact that Beer Organ (that’s what I’ve taken to calling ChurchKey, because, c’mon, they have a beer organ) features beers on draft and on cask and about 4 gazillion other beers in bottles, the best pull in the city can still be found at The Saloon, about a stop away on the Circulator. Over a couple of visits to Beer Organ, I didn’t find anything to compete with the Schloss Eggenberg Spezial Dunkel, which is to my mind the best beer to be found in the District.

Second thing: I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do at Beer Organ. It’s too cavernous for a date, too crowded for a party, too much of a tavern for dinner. I don’t recall televisions, but in any event, it’d be no good for watching a game: it’s too fine. It’s a grand place and I have enjoyed drinking there, but every time I have gone it has been for the specific purpose of going there—either for my first visit or for someone else’s. (For those of you joining us from outside the District, there was a lot of hype surrounding the opening of this bar and its adjoining restaurant, Birch & Barley.) Now, there is no doubt in my mind that this spot is exactly right for a foodie happy hour, but there are lamentably too few of these to fill up my evenings. I get the idea that ChurchKey is something of an important bar that doesn’t serve any obvious purpose in my life the way other important bars do.

By Kay Steiger

by Flickr user eejones (Creative Commons license)

EEJ made these Black Bottom Cups because they brought back childhood memories. They still look pretty tasty! This photo, as usual, comes from the IFA Food Porn photo pool.

Photo by Flickr user Curtis McCormick. Creative Commons license.

by A.A.

Chocolate chip cookies. You love them, I love them, and we can all agree that anyone who doesn’t love them is not to be trusted.  Unlike other desserts, though, there hasn’t been a lot of notable innovation in chocolate chip cookie baking.  As a kid I used to make the standard Toll House recipe fairly often, but it was generally just a ruse so that my brothers and I could eat massive amounts of raw cookie dough.  I thought about it recently, and decided that the Toll House recipe can’t be the final word. With so many amateur home cooks and their delicious baking blogs, and with foodie reinterpretations of comfort food at an all-time high, I figured somebody must have taken the time to update that old chestnut.

After some dutiful googling, I discovered that there are a handful of new recommendations to improve chocolate chip cookies.  Basically, they are:

• Melt the butter. Melt it carefully on a double-boiler and let it cool before combining it with the white and brown sugars.  Toll House et al. always said to simply “cream” softened/room temperature butter with the sugar, but melting it makes for a smoother butter-sugar end product. Which, let’s be candid, is delicious in and of itself.
• Double, triple, or quadruple the amount of vanilla. Not one teaspoon. More like one tablespoon.  And of course, I don’t even need to stress the importance of using real vanilla and not “imitation” extract, right?
• Refrigerate the dough overnight, anywhere from 12 to 36 hours depending on your baking schedule.  I don’t know why this is assumed to help, but I tried it anyway and refrigerated my dough for about 24 hours.  Note that this makes it much harder to work with the dough before baking, so you may want to consider rolling the dough into balls and then refrigerating them.
• Sprinkle sea salt on top before baking.  This is another example of the saltification of desserts that’s all the rage.

I tried all of these tips, and added one of my own, by readjusting the white-to-brown sugar ratio from 1:1 to one-half cup granulated sugar and 1 cup light brown sugar.  This makes the cookies a little bit darker, but richer.

Verdict?  Success.  These were definitely better than your everyday Toll House-recipe cookies.  Despite using the same amount of butter (1 c.) as a normal recipe, these tasted very buttery – I credit melting the butter.  The best ever, though? I don’t know.  They still flattened out a bit too much for my liking – any ideas on how to minimize that?

And the key takeaway is that no matter what recipe you use, chocolate chip cookies, like most baked goods, taste best when eaten warm out of the oven.

Recipe below the jump. Add your tips in comments.

• 1 c. (2 sticks) unsalted butter
• 1 c. firmly packed light brown sugar
• ½ c. granulated sugar
• 1 T. real vanilla extract
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 c. all-purpose flour
• 1 t. baking soda
• 1 t. salt
• Chocolate chips to taste – I used an entire bag and think that’s pushing it too far. Consider ¾ of a normal-sized bag of chips.

1. Melt butter on a double-boiler and set aside to cool briefly.  Once cool, combine butter with the brown and white sugar and beat until smooth.  Add vanilla, then stir in the eggs one at a time.
2. In a small bowl, sift flour, salt and baking soda together. Or, if you are like me and don’t own a sifter, combine in a bowl and stir with a fork.  Slowly add the flour mixture to the egg-sugar-butter mixture, stirring in just a bit at a time until all of the flour mixture has been integrated into the dough.  Add the chocolate chips.
3. Roll dough into cookie-sized balls, cover in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 12-36 hours.
4. When it comes time to bake, preheat oven to 350-degrees. (You know your oven better than I do; adjust accordingly).  Line cookie sheets with foil and make sure the cookie dough balls have plenty of space in between them.  Sprinkle with sea salt.  Bake for 10-12 minutes (again, keep an eye on them and adjust time accordingly).  When done, remove from oven and transfer cookies to wire racks to cool.
5. Pour a glass of milk.  Enjoy your milk and cookies. Contemplate how much happiness has been distilled into this one brief, fleeting moment.

By Kay Steiger

by Flickr user umamigirl (Creative Commons license)

Umamigirl finds a way around grilling potatoes by broiling them in the cold weather. This photo, as usual, comes from the IFA Food Porn photo pool.