- Nee Nee offers up our favorite solution yet for the great how to peel a hard boiled egg mystery:

This is en egg-peeling solution only for cooking solo and not sharing food. If you crack a bit off the hollow end of the egg and put your mouth around it while making a seal and blow hard for a few seconds, it loosens the egg from the membrane and makes it much easier to peel. Gross, I know, but it work really well.

A-mazing. That might have to be the official ES-endorsed way to crack an egg.

- Meanwhile, bcarter3 disagrees with Fuchs Foodie’s Top Chef dismay:

Nonsense. “Top Chef” is a game show, not a cooking lesson. Does anyone watch “Survivor” for tips on how to survive in the wilderness? “The Price Is Right” for shopping hints? “American Idol” for singing lessons?

But rose saunders expects more from the Emmy-winning Padma & Company:

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This week’s episode of Top Chef saw our Chef’testants pack their knives and say goodbye to DC, heading off to Singapore– but they still had one last showdown with the good folks at NASA.

Yes, that is Buzz Aldrin sitting next to Padma. Oh, and Anthony Bourdain. read more…

After the two-hour drive to Des Moines, Iowa, my taste buds were ready for the greasy foods on a stick and ridiculous fair concoctions that only the Iowa State Fair could deliver. My goal was to attend the fair on an empty stomach so I could report back to you, dear ESer, about how the delicious fried things on a stick tasted. But I have a confession to make: I WAS NOT HUNGRY. After a sweet and greasy fried twinkie that got me all sticky, my body said “no way are you eating any more of this shit.” No, the wasp drowning in the sugary residue around a funnel cake was not appetizing. And last time I checked, hot beef sundaes would make any normal person want to vomit. About eight bottles of water and 500 pictures later, I was exhausted, smelly, tired and grossed out. I never did find those chicken lips on a stick. I feel somewhat cheated.

It was a twilight zone of meat: pork, steak, chicken, turkey, bacon, sausage, meatballs, 1/2 lb tenderloins, hamburgers. And it seemed that every other person I saw was a walking example of what happens if one eats state fair food as one’s daily diet. The people watching just got better and better and more alarming as we made our way around the fair. (Picture the humans in the movie Wall-E.) I couldn’t snap my camera fast enough. In speaking with one seemingly regular gentleman, he asked me what I was doing with the big camera. I told him that I was photographing state fair food. He asked me, “are you taking pictures of all the freaks?” Yes, yes, I was. I couldn’t keep my shutter shut.

We were also lucky enough to catch a few of the animals left in their pens, including a gigantic pig that looked like a hippopotamus, sheep, goats, turkeys, ducks and cows. The smell, oh the smell, can only be described as hot and pungent. And most likely, very soon, these animals would be on a stick somewhere. Gross.

Pop a few antacids before you browse the selection of photos:

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gansie: This is a seriously beautiful picture
80P: Yea, thanks
gansie: Well, what’s funny about it
80P: I can’t think of any more funny things about food
<<<It is the 103rd Artsy Photo of the Day that we’ve had to think of a caption for>>>
gansie: Well…
80P: I think it looks like the Loch Ness Monster
ganise: Uh…the Loch Ness Okra?
<<<Wow, it really does look like Nessie>>>

Editors’ Note: DC-based blogger Fuchs Foodie just can’t take it anymore. Today, he joins the ES team to point out just what’s been bugging a lot of us about Top Chef this season.

Recent press about Top Chef reads like the notes of a marriage counselor trying to figure out why a once-meaningful relationship has taken a nosedive. In a July poll, the L.A. Times found that 60 percent of people surveyed thought that Top Chef is “losing its heat.” Food writers have offered plenty of opinions to explain the sudden disaffection towards this once exceedingly popular show. The chefs this season aren’t talented enough, says John Horn in the L.A. Times. There aren’t any villains you love to hate, says Josh Ozersky in Time magazine. Yumsugar is tired of the same challenges recycled from previous seasons.

As a long-time watcher of the show, I see some truth to each of these theories, but I can think of a more fundamental problem: Top Chef is a show about food that no longer teaches us much of anything about food. Instead of actually entertaining its foodie audience with inventive dishes, the producers obsess over portraying every personality quirk they can mine from the contestants. In between quirks, the producers share mundane details about the contestants’ lives.

To see if I was imagining things, during last week’s episode, I kept track of the information I learned about cooking in one column, and, in a second column, information about the contestants’ personal issues/dog-walking habits.

Here’s what I learned about food:

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No, really — it works. I swear.

On a recent trip to Chicago, the best meal I ate was at aja, an inventive find in the otherwise bland River North neighborhood downtown. Joshua Linton is a 30-year-old chef who has worked under a whole bunch of notable names, including our boy Jose Andres in D.C., so you know he’s got some tricks up his sleeve.

Before I dined at Aja, several Chicagoans all told me the same thing — be sure to try the hamachi guacamole. Um…what? That does not sound right. Clearly, I had to taste it.

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Now that I work from home my morning routine is different. Instead of springing out of bed, having waited for the last of the possible “snoozes,” I now roll over, shut my alarm off and open my email. Right there in bed, with the ease of my newly updated (software version 4.0.2) iPhone.

First I check my work email to make sure nothing insane has happened, then my personal email. I receive a few blog posts directly to my email (otherwise I’m really terrible at keeping up with other food blogs that I enjoy). One of these is from Macheesmo.

Yesterday Nick wrote a thoughtful piece on the recent egg recall. As eggs’ number one fan, I knew this sort of danger was coming. But also as eggs’ fan, I know to buy my yolky treats straight from farmers. Farmers (thank you Truck Patch) that raise chickens as chickens should be raised, not cramped in an immoral amount of space and fed, well, I can’t be sure, but it’s not natural.

While most egg buyers tucked their sunny side up desires away, I, instead, dreamed of how I would use eggs in my lunch that very day. read more…