Dear Helena,
I'm making dinner for my girlfriend this Valentine's Day. I want to make something that will be delicious, but will also create the right romantic atmosphere. What do you suggest?
—Master Chef & Seducer

Dear Master Chef,
Festive meals usually include rich, extravagant foods that we don't eat every day, like fine cuts of meat, butter, cheese, and chocolate, not to mention plenty of alcohol. That's fine if it's Thanksgiving or Christmas and you can undo the top button on your pants and veg out afterward. But on Valentine's Day, after-dinner activities are more, er, athletically demanding. So you need to plan a menu that will leave your girlfriend feeling energized. This isn't manipulation; it's simple good manners.

In order to figure out what to serve, we need to first understand what is wrong with the traditional meal. The dinner on offer at the Addison at the Grand Del Mar in San Diego may be more elaborate than most, but the ingredients—meat, cheese, chocolate—are typical Valentine's Day fare. The menu weaves its way through smoked pork agnolotti, squab rôti, and a cheese course before ending in a chocolate tart with homemade marshmallows. Dr. Melina Jampolis, a physician nutrition specialist, is unimpressed: "Heavy foods that are more slowly digested, like meat, are going to impair your friskiness. ... A large meal that is high in carbs will put you to sleep, instead of putting you in the mood."

So what should you serve? Jessica Crandall, a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, recommends combining "good" carbs and proteins "for better endurance later on." If you want to avoid feeling bloated and tired, then the protein serving size should be "no bigger than your cell phone." "Good carbs," she explains, comprise fruits, vegetables, and, of course, whole grains.

This probably all sounds a bit too healthful. A carefully measured portion of poached chicken breast will make your girlfriend feel like she's at a weight-loss spa. You want to cook a meal that will make her feel like you really made an effort.

So what can you serve that is celebratory but won't weigh you down? Fish is ideal. Ronna Welsh, owner of Purple Kale Kitchenworks, a cooking school in Brooklyn, suggests skate wings. She recommends that instead of serving depressing brown rice you choose a whole grain like polenta, finished with a really good extra-virgin olive oil instead of butter. (Fish with polenta is a traditional Venetian dish.) On the side? A watercress salad, says Welsh.

As for dessert, Crandall suggests chocolate-dipped strawberries, which are easy to make yourself. "Chocolate has caffeine and chemicals that will make you a little bit more alert," explains Dr. Jampolis, and will "offset the more sedating effects of alcohol." (Apparently, all dietitians love chocolate-covered strawberries.) And the meal must of course include alcohol, though in moderation. If you want to maintain energy levels, "no more than a glass for women, two for men," says Jampolis.

If this menu still seems too punitive, then do as Crandall suggests and "engage in activity beforehand." Then you can eat and drink as much as you want.

For a chocolate lover, walking into The Meadow in Manhattan's West Village is a bit like walking into a cathedral—one that also functions as a methadone clinic. Bars and bars of gorgeous, painstakingly crafted chocolate line the shelves, quietly demanding both reverence and the total abandonment of reason and self-restraint.

The intoxicating hybrid is the work of Mark Bitterman and Jennifer Turner Bitterman (pictured), who opened their first location of The Meadow in Portland, Oregon, in 2006. Four years later, they launched a second store in New York City. Their shops feature over 300 varieties of chocolate bars from around the world, with a particular emphasis on dark chocolate. The selection reads like a who's-who of the small-batch, bean-to-bar world: Dick Taylor, Rogue, Cacao Atlanta, and Olive and Sinclair, plus established European makers like Amedei, Valrhona, Bonnat, and Michel Cluizel.

The Meadow also has a superb collection of salt, bitters, and flowers, but in honor of Valentine's Day's, Mark Bitterman took some time to talk with CHOW.com about the sweeter side of the business.

How do you find the chocolates you stock? Do producers approach you?

They don't approach us very much. What you see in the store is rarely the stuff that approaches us. My desk is just piled with samples of chocolate, but usually they're things that aren't appropriate for our store—we usually end up feeding them to staff and children. That's one of my real passions and a big part of what I do in my life: I love to research and dig up new products. There's a lot of word of mouth; I talk to chocolate makers and hear what they know. And half of all of our recommendations comes from customers—there's a fantastic community of chocophiles.

It seems like Americans are so much better educated about chocolate than they were a decade ago.

Chocolate is the new wine. It's every bit as sophisticated and complex and delicious. It's more difficult to make in terms of cost benefit. You can buy a $10 or $8 chocolate bar that's equal to a $100 Bordeaux.

Yet a lot of people see a $10 chocolate bar and freak out.

People are very confused about pricing. The thing is that a good chocolate bar is not candy at all. It's extraordinarily and carefully handcrafted using the finest agricultural products in the world, culled from the best of the best. To say it costs a lot of money is completely absurd.

Also, it's not like you're buying it to eat everyday.

That's very moderate and smart-sounding, but to flip it on the other side, why the heck shouldn't you eat it every day? Truthfully, high-quality chocolate is one of the most beneficial substances known to man. We think it's being kind of coy to say that eating chocolate is good for you because [people] are thinking of candy, but chocolate is as natural and wholesome as kale, but a billion times more rare and precious and special. So you don't have to eat it every day, but you can also say many people spend three to five bucks a day on coffee. A buck a day on a really nice square of dark chocolate is a hell of a lot more satisfying than a cup of coffee.

So how much chocolate do you eat every day?

[Laughs] I eat all that I can. I am serious. I basically keep it around the house and have it on my desk; I have sweet chocolate for dessert after dinner, and dark during the day. I eat half a bar a day on average, sometimes a bar.

What are some of the products you're excited by right now?

A brand new bar by Ritual just came into our store in New York. It's a Costa Rica bar, and it's insane. There's a new chocolate maker in Portland called Woodblock. Total small fry, and he's great.

Bigger companies have been taking a page from the small-batch manufacturers and jumping onto the single-origin and varietal bean bandwagon. What do you think about that?

That kind of cynicism about corporate America, I certainly have it in spades, but I've also worked with some of these guys and they're passionate chocolate makers. They love the craft. They don't necessarily have the same controls or creativity, but people making chocolate for big companies are pretty fascinated with chocolate.

Would you carry their products?

I will never carry a large-scale manufacturer. The reason is twofold: One, it's not our mission to help people with things they can buy everywhere, and two is this issue of how to make the finest quality things. You cannot buy chocolate in vast quantities of the highest quality. The agriculture is still too new. So if you want to eat the best chocolate you can't go to the biggest guys.

What are some of the bigger trends you've observed since you opened your first store in 2006?

The major trend is that the world is going bean to bar. That's the most dramatic thing and probably the most important thing that could happen—it creates a competitive environment, which means farmers get paid more and standards of productions go up, and that's very fun. Another one is this new American flavor profile, a new vision of flavor. I think it's directly born out of what happened with coffee, the idea of roasting to profile. It's very, very important and very different, and really in a certain sense anti-European in attitude. The European attitude is perfection of a whole, "This is what a beautiful chocolate bar should look like." Amedei's chocolate bar is the quintessential example, like, "Jesus Christ, that's the bar I always dreamed about." But then you taste a Rogue or Patric or Taylor bar, and see a very different attitude, where I'm trying to listen to what the chocolate has to say to me.

Do you think people will grow weary of sweet-salty flavors like bacon?

I would say both won't go away anytime soon. I don't know that they need to go away. Putting bacon in chocolate brings good chocolate back into the realm of candy. It makes it serious candy, and we all like candy. So you put bacon in chocolate, goose it with a little bit of sweetness, and you've got something fairly serious and beautiful. Xocolatl de David is a good example, and Vosges was commercially successful doing that, but didn't invent it. On the flip side, the real rage would be a fleur de sel chocolate bar. It's balanced and the salt adds more flavor and complexity, and keeps your palate from gobbling it down. You kind of savor it and evaluate it as you eat.

Craving more chocolate? Read these:

Colin Gasko Is Making Chocolate from Wild Cacao

Olive and Sinclair’s Scott Witherow Talks Southern Chocolate

Image source: The Meadow

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[chowvideo width='540' height='435' align='center']

Making bean-to-bar chocolate isn't for the faint of heart. In 2006, when a 21-year-old Colin Gasko began making chocolate in Minneapolis, he was lucky to have the hubris of youth on his side. “I just thought it was so obscenely crazy to be doing what I was doing,” says Gasko, who in person projects the detached, thoughtful demeanor of a computer engineer. In the years since Gasko founded his Rogue Chocolatier company, the bean-to-bar field has broadened, though with fewer than two dozen makers currently in the U.S., it’s still small. “It's crystallizing into a movement," Gasko says.

Gasko's latest project is equally ambitious: an $11 bar of chocolate called Silvestre, made from wild cacao harvested in the Amazon basin, along Bolivia’s Rio Beni. There’s only been one other attempt—by some Jesuits in the 16th century—to make wild cacao commercially viable, and that failed.

Gasko relies on cacao foragers to obtain the raw ingredient. "They go around in boats,” he says. “There are these huge unkempt trees on the side of the river, and they forage a bunch of pods. They have this incredibly crude post-harvest process, where they dump the seeds and the pulp.” Instead of a typical fermentation facility, foragers fill cloth bags with the wet cacao and hang them from trees before drying.

A centralized buyer collects chocolate from the independent collectors and negotiates sales to chocolatiers. Gasko says that, to the best of his knowledge, he's the only chocolatier in the country producing chocolate exclusively from wild cacao.

When we talked to Gasko he was at work on his third iteration of wild-cacao chocolate (it wasn’t ready for us to taste). "It has this deep, heavy earthiness," Gasko says of the flavor. "It has plum and a little bit of orange and some sort of ... it’s something I can't get my head around, kind of like spices." He pauses for a moment. "It's pretty unique."

But flavor is only half the story. Gasko notes that creating a market for a wild product from the Amazon can help sustain the forest itself. “The idea is that it's more valuable to keep the forest than cut it down."

Craving more chocolate? Read these:

Olive and Sinclair’s Scott Witherow Talks Southern Chocolate

The Meadow’s Mark Bitterman: Don’t Call It Candy!

Image source: Colin Gasko / Rogue Chocolatier

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This week, like most, has brought a familiar hodgepodge of good and not-so-good news about the American diet.

First, the good: A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association says that trans fats—which typically come from hydrogenated vegetable oils—are on their way out of the American diet. Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that among white adults, trans-fatty acid levels decreased 58 percent from 2000 to 2009. The researchers, who are now studying trans-fat levels in the nonwhite adult population, call this statistic "astounding."

The drop may have a lot to do with the Food and Drug Administration's 2006 decision to require food manufacturers to include trans fats in their nutritional labeling, something that in turn inspired health departments across the country to pressure restaurants to stop cooking with them. Although the FDA regulations haven't eliminated the use of partially hydrogenated oils in processed foods—as the Huffington Post notes, products like Jimmy Dean Croissant Sandwiches and Pop Secret Kettle Corn still pack 'em—it has drastically decreased their prevalence.

Now the not-so-good news, for bread lovers anyway. The busy bees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released yet another study this week, this one bearing the somewhat surprising findings that the number one source of salt in the average American diet is not chips, pretzels, or shady lunch meat, but bread and rolls. The reason: On its own, bread isn't particularly salty, but we eat a ton of it. The report clarifies that most of the bread we consume is made outside the home, as are the majority of the other foods (pizza, cold cuts, sandwiches like cheeseburgers) that make up the CDC's list of the top 10 sources of sodium in the American diet.

That isn't particularly surprising, and neither is the CDC's recommendation that manufacturers reduce the sodium levels in their damn products (or, failing that, that we start paying more attention to nutritional labeling). It's hard to say which seems more unlikely, but hey, at least we've got our trans-fat laurels to rest on.

Image source: Flickr member rossbelmont under Creative Commons

All over Britain right now, the underemployed and job-insecure are hunkering down with spotted dick and Bakewell tart. That’s the finding, anyway, of a report this week in the Mail Online. Just in time for the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, recession-weary Britons are making like Cratchits, donning fingerless gloves and gathering before meager coal fires (I totally made that up) to eat “steamed treacle pud” and apple crumble. The Mail even trots out a food historian who implies a parallel between our own times and the boom/bust era of Dickens’s England, where “irresponsible bankers and businessmen” spoiled everybody's fun.

Here in the U.S., Tuesday’s Dickens bicentenary was pretty much limited to NPR sound bites from the musical Oliver! and a commemorative Google Doodle that, with its top hats and lampposts, leaned heavily on Christmas card cliché.

But America’s lackluster Dickensmania doesn’t mean we aren’t playing our own version of cultural dress-up, complete with vintage tails and ruffled maids’ caps. Downton Abbey, the Masterpiece miniseries now in season two, is giving PBS its biggest boost since Suze Orman became the obsessively tanned face of pledge drives.

In case you’ve been in some sort of culture deprivation chamber, I should explain that Downton is a British import (it premiered on the U.K.’s ITV network in 2010), like David Copperfield and The X Factor. But unlike Simon Cowell’s X Factor, Americans can’t get enough of Downton and its post-Edwardian world of tea and melodrama. When even a B-list comic uses a British costume drama to boost audience share on Twitter, you know the zeitgeist is stirring.

And unlike those “irresponsible bankers and businessmen” who made ordinary Victorians destitute enough to have to eat the kind of starchy puddings now being revived in London condos, Downton aristocrats like the Earl of Grantham are kind. Even the bitchy Dowager Countess Violet, played by a deliciously wrinkled Maggie Smith, has treacle in her veins.

We’re an optimistic people, us Yanks. Even at the lower reaches of the 99th percentile, we think, someday we’ll rise, if not to Downton heights, at least to McMansion ones. How long before there’s a Downton Abbey cookbook, tempting us with Mrs. Patmore’s Ginger Scones, Lady Grantham’s Raspberry Blancmange, and the Turkish Ambassador’s Hummus? Judging from other attempts to turn the manor into an ATM, not long. Let the English brood in chilly rooms, with plates of Eve’s pudding balanced on their knees. On this side of the pond, we’ll all be doing Gilded Age dinner parties soon. Some of us already have.

Image source: PBS.org

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If Russell Jackson, chef-owner of Lafitte in San Francisco, were stranded on a desert island, he would want just one thing: foie gras. If you share his passion, you can use this quick, easy method for canning goose liver to ensure you're adequately prepared for the unthinkable. (Or you can just order some potted foie gras straight from Lafitte.)

CHOW Tips are the shared wisdom of our community. If you’ve figured out some piece of food, drink, or cooking wisdom that you’d like to share on video (and you can be in San Francisco), email Blake Smith and tell us what you’ve got in mind.

It's hard not to be drawn in by extraordinary claims. When a company willingly raises the bar, it's you, the consumer, who gets to bitterly complain at length when the product falls flat. And if it doesn't, well, huzzah, you've enjoyed whatever extraordinary offering has been dangled in your direction.

Whole Foods is ground zero for some of the most interesting and extreme claims in the world of food—its customers have an interest in self-medicating through magical food, and said customers have the money to do so. And it was at Whole Foods that I stumbled upon the prominently displayed Green SuperFood Orange Dreamsicle Drink Powder.

The actual pitch is so extraordinary that it demands reprinting in full: "A little taste of Summer in every cup, Orange Dreamsicle Green SuperFood ensures you and your family will love drinking your greens. Greens that taste like an Orange Creamsicle? Sounds more like Orange Dreamsicle!"

After all that, it's a little disappointing to discover that the product, a powdered drink additive with antioxidants, vitamins, and fiber, is a fine green powder that resembles lawn fertilizer or some sort of obscure hobby material. It's then a little encouraging to mix said powder into water—creating a dark green slurry only slightly more appetizing than bread mold—and discover that it smells, a bit, like an orange Creamsicle.

Then you taste the stuff. The Creamsicle is there, somewhere, in the background, but what you're getting is not so much a Popsicle on a hot summer day as a Popsicle that was dropped in a puddle of algae and then dipped in a glass of water.

If the concept behind Green SuperFood Orange Dreamsicle Drink Powder is that it helps the magic medicine go down by making it taste irresistible, then consider the concept thoroughly busted: It was a pleasure to dump my 90 percent unconsumed glass of this stuff down the kitchen sink. Orange Dreamsicle, indeed.

As a lot of kindergartners these days could tell you, fruit juice isn't the healthy substitute for soda that Mott's and Welch's would like you to think. It's sugar in a more wholesome package, as capable of passing along liquid calories as a can of Coke. Manufacturers of bottled juices have gone to increasingly hyperbolic lengths to disguise this inconvenient fact, embellishing labels with healthy buzzwords: "antioxidants," "electrolytes," "Omega-3s," and that old chestnut, "fiber."

But as the dependably adversarial folks at the Center for Science in the Public Interest point out in their latest Nutrition Action Health Letter, most of those claims are emptier than the calories in a glass of Ocean Spray's Cran Energy Cranberry Raspberry Energy Juice Drink. Methodically, the newsletter picks apart spin-heavy juices like Trop50 Orange, IZZE Sparkling Juices, and Minute Maid's Help Nourish Your Brain 100% Fruit Juice Blend, even though you'd think the implausibility of the latter's claim would be self-evident.

Among the more compelling, if sadly predictable, revelations? IZZE's seemingly exotic blackberry, clementine, lime, blueberry, peach, grapefruit, and pomegranate juices are actually a combination of apple and white grape, with about the same number of calories as an identical serving of soda. Minute Maid's Natural Energy Pomegranate Berry Enhanced Juice Drink doesn't contain pomegranate but does contain water, pear juice, and sugar (actual "berry" content is less than 1 percent). And although V8 boasts its "essential antioxidants" and vitamins A, C, and E, so does just about any drink where vitamins are added by the manufacturer. What's more, V8's claim that it contains "nutrients that support the immune system" are also meaningless, as any food or beverage that contains a vitamin or mineral can make that claim without offering real evidence.

The upshot of all of this? Drink water. Or whiskey, which makes no claims to health and has probably inspired far more well-being than the methane gas emanating from the juice aisle.

Image source: Flickr member Jake Spurlock under Creative Commons

For years, restaurant owners have hired specialists to design menus that exploit "menu psychology," the little mechanisms that entice customers to order more. But as the Huffington Post reported recently, at least one oft-repeated "fact" about the way diners read menus is nonsense.

Menu psychologists have long argued that customers read menus in a nonlinear way, eyes flitting around the page but focusing mainly on the upper-right quadrant, a place called the "sweet spot." Not true, says Sybil Yang, an assistant professor of hospitality at San Francisco State University, who hooked up test subjects to infrared retinal eye scanners before handing them menus. And how did they read them? Top to bottom and left to right, just like a book. The "sweet spot"? Myth.

In fact, a lot of the so-called accepted wisdom about menu psychology just isn't supported by research.

Myth: Red is appetizing, purple is not.

The color red supposedly increases your heartbeat as well as your appetite. Orange and yellow are thought to be similarly "yummy." Blue is controversial; some say it stimulates the appetite, others say it doesn't, though almost everybody agrees that gray and purple are unappetizing. But nobody's ever proven any of that to be true. There is some evidence that brown liquids are rated slightly less refreshing than other colors, and that eating food of any one color gets old after a while. In fact, one recent study found that test subjects ate less from red plates than from blue ones. So much for the assumption that red makes you ravenous.

Myth: Pictures of food are tacky.

We're not running a restaurant here at CHOW.com, but we have found that recipes without pictures don't generate much interest. Seeing an image of a food you like makes you want it, and can even override hunger signals. So why wouldn't every restaurant put luscious food photos on the menu? It's not classy, say menu psychologists, with no evidence whatsoever. In fact, there's far more evidence to suggest that the volume and type of background music a restaurant plays has a much greater influence on what customers spend.

Myth: Being upfront about prices scares diners.

Here's a real sacred cow. "In the world of menu engineering and pricing, a dollar sign is pretty much the worst thing you can put on a menu, particularly at a high-end restaurant," asserted the New York Times in 2009. Some menus leave off prices altogether, particularly on specials, or finesse the pricing format, hoping to strike magic. But there's simply no evidence that hiding prices changes diner behavior, according to a Cornell study by Sybil Yang. The only thing pretty much everybody agrees about is just how much diners hate having to ask how much something costs.

Image source: Flickr member stevendepolo under Creative Commons

Dear Helena,
The other night I was sitting at a bar having a glass of wine and catching up with my girlfriend, and this guy leaned over to listen to my conversation, clearly eavesdropping. He let out chuckles from time to time. We tried to ignore him. Then he leaned over and abruptly told us that he thought we were "boring." He was clearly drunk, and the bartender could see he was bothering us. Was it the bartender's responsibility to cut him off?
—Stay Out of My Conversation

Dear Stay Out,
Some people act like oafs whether or not they have had anything to drink, and the bartender is powerless to do anything about that. But bartenders are obliged to stop serving alcohol when customers are obviously trashed. For one thing, according to "dram shop law," bars and/or individual bartenders may be held liable if a drunk harms a third party after leaving the premises. (Exact laws vary by state.) And of course drunks can cause plenty of harm while they're still at the bar. Mike Ryan, head bartender at Sable Kitchen & Bar in Chicago, recalls a recent guest who drank seven or eight vodka martinis, then offended two female customers by suggesting a threesome.

So how does a bartender decide when someone has had too much? That decision shouldn't be based on quantity consumed, says Ryan. "There are no set rules, like people can only have five drinks. ... Some people are wasted after one cocktail; some can drink seven drinks in a row and still stand up." So the poster in this Chowhound thread was right to be annoyed: The bartender seems to have cut him off purely because he had consumed three drinks in a little over an hour.

In fact, the cutoff should be based on behavior. The symptoms of extreme drunkenness are pretty obvious: slurred speech, glassy eyes, and the loss of fine motor control.

Curtailing a customer's booze intake is a three-step process:

1. Anticipate. The bartender can ward off trouble—especially if he has seen the customer overdo it before—by taking a really, really long time to serve them. If the bar is busy, says Ryan, "they usually find someone to talk to and forget they've ordered a beer." If the bar is half-empty, it's trickier to explain why you're taking half an hour to make a vodka tonic.

2. Deflect. "Saying, 'No, you're trashed,' is a good way to provoke them," says Ryan. Instead of a direct refusal, Ryan prefers to "slide over a glass of water or Coca-Cola and say, 'Why don't you try this for now?'" Jeffrey Morgenthaler, bar manager of Clyde Common in Portland, Oregon, says he has to cut someone off about once a month; he serves coffee or food on the house, or offers to pay for a cab home.

3. Stand firm. Most drunks take the hint, says Ryan. "Usually if they order beer and get water, they say, 'Am I that drunk?' and I say, 'Yeeeeeah, sorry.'" But every so often, "they're feeling great and they just want to keep the party going." Some of the worst offenders are wedding guests, who frequent Ryan's bar because it's adjacent to a hotel. These people may have been drinking since lunchtime. "I've had to physically throw people out a couple of times. ... I've had to cut off the father of the bride because he was drooling on himself. He said, 'I spent all this money in the hotel. I demand a drink.' I was like, 'Well, you got what you paid for: You're trashed.'"

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Olive Garden and Red Lobster are in the news this week, and it's not because inexplicably vast numbers of people are planning to patronize them on Valentine's Day.

Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC-United) has filed an employee discrimination lawsuit against Darden Restaurants, the corporation that owns the chains, charging that nonwhite workers at Darden's upscale steakhouse chain Capital Grille are routinely placed in low-paying kitchen positions while white workers are given more lucrative jobs as waiters, hosts, and bartenders (pictured).

ROC has launched an accompanying campaign called Dignity at Darden that paints a fairly bleak picture of the Orlando-based company (the world's largest full-service restaurant group), which somewhat ironically prides itself on its diversity. If ROC-United is correct, many of Darden's 179,000 employees are paid poverty wages, not given sick days, forced to work without pay, and susceptible to having their tips distributed to workers ineligible for them.

This isn't the first time the group has inserted itself like a thorn into a restaurant company's side. In 2010, ROC filed a lawsuit alleging that workers at Mario Batali's Del Posto were the victims of tip and wage discrimination. Batali subsequently filed a $6 million countersuit and got a temporary restraining order to stop protests outside of Del Posto. (He later appeared to take protests by bankers a bit more to heart.)

Regardless of the truth of the allegations against Darden, racial discrimination in the restaurant industry is far from the exception to the rule. According to ROC-United's "Blacks in the Restaurant Industry" report, African Americans comprise 58 percent of the industry's lowest-paying, quick-serve segment, compared to white workers at only 26 percent. Black workers also make about $4 an hour less than white ones. "When you're here, you're family," goes Olive Garden's well-known catch phrase. If ROC-United's charges are valid, that would mean that for some Darden workers, not all families are created equal.

Image source: Flickr member Yelp.com under Creative Commons

This episode of My Go-To Dish features Mark McClusky, special projects editor at Wired magazine and Wired.com. McClusky has reported on and learned about modernist cuisine from some of its most well-known pioneers. His DIY American cheese recipe uses a scientific approach to cooking. To take part in the experiment, see the recipe. And once you've made Mark's cheese, try it in a grilled cheese sandwich, like he uses it here, or stuff it into a Juicy Lucy Burger.

In My Go-To Dish, meticulously trained chefs, hardworking food-industry folks, and even, sometimes, famous actors show us their delicious, reliable, and easy meals. It's how they get dinner on the table quickly after a long day. Remember: They're just like us.

Each week, we lift the lid on CHOW.com's Test Kitchen to reveal what our recipe developers are working on.

The typical Jell-O shot is a blue-raspberry nightmare. Is it possible to make one that is not only pretty but actually tastes like a balanced cocktail? That's one of the things we've been working on in CHOW.com's Test Kitchen this week for an upcoming Mardi Gras feature. We started with three classic New Orleans cocktails as inspiration: the Sazerac, Hurricane, and Ramos Gin Fizz. The challenge was figuring out how to gelatinize them in a way that ended up saying dinner party, not frat-house kegger.

Since we wanted the shots to end up layered, we decided not to use individual paper cups. Instead, we chose square baking pans we could pour different layers into, let them set, then flip them out and cut into individual serving squares. We hoped they'd look cool in cross-section.

The Hurricane (pictured) was the most challenging of the three to get right. In cocktail form, it's a fruity rum drink made with passionfruit and grenadine, and often a rum float on top. For our first try, assistant food editor Lisa Lavery heated up a cup of dark rum with a packet of gelatin dissolved in an ounce of simple syrup, poured the mixture into a pan, and chilled it to set. Then she poured on a mix of gelatin, light rum, grenadine, and a mix of passionfruit, lime, and orange juices and refrigerated it.

Once we flipped it out of the pan, our fruit layer topped with a rum "float" didn't look so hot. The rum layer had taken on a weird cloudy purplish-brown color, plus it slid off, looking oddly like chicken livers strewn onto the fruity layer. It was also seriously boozy, like swigging rum straight out of the bottle.

From our tests on the Sazerac shots, we realized that a liquor-to-water ratio of 1:1 would yield a nice, clear layer when set with gelatin, and still preserve the strong flavor of the spirit without kicking you in the face. So for round two of the Hurricane, we added a cup of water to the rum layer and switched from simple syrup to granulated sugar to better quantify the volume of water we were adding.

It totally worked! The rum "float" came out dark and clear, and did not at all resemble innards. Score.

Check back next week to get the final recipes for the Jell-O shot versions of the Hurricane; the multilayered, orange blossom-scented Ramos Gin Fizz; and the Sazerac, squares of rye jelly brushed with absinthe and bitters.

Photo by Roxanne Webber

Last week Jack in the Box rolled out the Bacon Shake, a cultural identifier masquerading as a 773-calorie beverage. It’s part of Jack’s Marry Bacon marketing campaign, which includes a $4.99 BLT cheeseburger combo, a tuxedo T-shirt you can order (it's got a bacon bowtie), and recent updates to Jack’s rather lackluster bacon Tumblr.

As far as the shake goes, “bacon” ought to be set off with quotation marks, since it contains no pork, only “bacon-flavored syrup,” which is technically bacon-less. A Jack in the Box spokeswoman calls the shake a “limited edition” product. Restaurants everywhere but Indianapolis—where, inexplicably, the Bacon Shake is as scarce as union rights—received a limited amount of bacon syrup, and zero signage. Jack expects the Bacon Shake to go viral via interoffice IMs alone.

At the Jack in the Box near CHOW.com’s offices, the counter guy gave me a sly half-smile when I asked for one. But what was shoved across the counter at me was beige and unexpectedly bland-looking, topped with a slumped swirl of whipped cream that a maraschino cherry had bled into like lipstick on a pillowcase. I’m a sucker for sugar, but even I found the Bacon Shake synapse-jackingly sweet, and the bacon flavor? Nothing more than artificial-tasting maple, like doughnut glaze, with a wisp of smoky flavor.

I’d expected the Bacon Shake to thrill and horrify, if only for the way it pushed the bacon meme. I ended up disappointed: The Bacon Shake is a fraud. Why didn't I order a Jumbaco instead?

Photo by Roxanne Webber