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Happy Holidays, here is me singing Santa Baby.

I am not great at the uke but I like to mess around with it so please be kind!!!

In this video you will notice me not looking at the camera once cuz I am wicked nervous.

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

This may or may not be the last recipe post you'll see which makes use of the cole slaw leftovers I had from my Food Lab recipe testing (see Hot Slaw Dogs and Pork Roll Rachel Sandwiches for some previous recipes) but it was one of the most rapidly consumed. The combination of hot, crisp, juicy, seasoned chicken with cool, crunchy, cream cole slaw in a warm buttered bun might not be unbeatable, but if there were ever a sandwich-based UFC, it'd earn a top seed.

Here's how I make mine.

The first step is really good fried chicken. There are a few keys to getting this right, but brining is one of them. My chicken spends a night in either a salt and sugar brine, or alternatively in a jar of kosher dill pickle juice, which performs the same function: it keeps the chicken moist as it fried. For extra juiciness and flavor, I use boneless skinless thighs instead of breast meat. After all, this is a fried chicken sandwich. It ain't exactly health food to begin with.

Next, I dip my chicken in a buttermilk and egg solution seasoned with black pepper and paprika before dipping it into a flour mixture with the same seasonings.

To get extra nooks, crannies, and craggly crispy bits, I make sure to drizzle a bit of the batter into the flour and mix it up with my fingertips before adding the chicken and pressing it firmly to get all those bits to adhere.

Letting it rest for 10 minutes or so before frying will help to ensure that the coating sticks to the chicken as it fries. It'll also get the coating a little crisper as the flour hydrates and gluten begins forming (do not let it rest more than ten minutes or it'll get too tough as it fries).

See what happens when you carefully fry that chicken in hot peanut oil? Glorious, isn't it?

All that's left is to toast a few soft buns (I use Martin's Potato Rolls) in butter, then assemble the sandwiches.

Cole slaw on the bottom, of course.

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

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Here's a new video from The Onion about a couple of friends whose web series has the rare distinction of having 100 people watch it – the ultimate goal of any web series about two guys playing fictionalized versions of themselves in their apartment.

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Let’s be honest: Most high school kids would choose school lunches over homemade lunches when given the choice. But not David LaFerriere’s kids Evan, 15, and Kenny, 14, because they’d miss out on their dad’s hand-drawn-surprise lunch bags!

“I’ve been doing it for my kids since they were little,” the graphic designer, known as D Laferriere on Flickr, tells us in the accompanying video. “They love it, and nothing makes me happier than hearing their reaction at the end of the day.”

David started making these decorative lunch bags back in May 2008. It all came about one morning in an attempt to do something special for his boys.

“It was just a way to have fun with the kids,” David says. “And also start my creative juices before work. I had already been making their lunches, and I experimented with a few things.”

David first began using food coloring and tried to draw directly onto the bread. The bread, however, was too rough, and the process became too time consuming, so he dropped that idea. He found a black Sharpie one morning on his kitchen counter and wondered if it would work – and sure enough it did.

“At first it was just red and black markers,” David says. “Then I got more colors and got more creative. The Sharpies were great; how they adhere to the bag. I’d tried all sorts of things to make different pictures like using a napkin to smudge the ink or different forms of shading. It was fun!”

David’s ideas for the bags come from a wide variety of places. He owns many different animals at his home in Massachusetts, so he often draws his chickens, rabbits and dogs – sometimes having the animals doing human activities, like a duck going tubing.

“I’ve had cupcakes, birthday cakes, crazy fish with eyes and robots,” David says. “I’ve had ants and bugs crawling around on the bags. You name it, I’ve done it.”

Often times David will look at the bread and get inspiration from the bread bubbles. “I’ll draw a fish around the bubble as if he’s about to eat it. One of my kids’ favorites is using the bubble as hole a worm comes out of!”

David decided to post his pictures on Flickr because eventually the bags get thrown out. He wanted a way to have them around to look back on. “You figure 180 school days in a year, and times that by two, that’s 360 days,” he says. “And then you add on summer time when they’re going to soccer camp, it all adds up. It’s been almost five years now, and it’s like 1,082 bags and counting.”

A few weeks after he began posting his pictures, David become overwhelmed with positive responses. He started getting contacts from people all over the world. “It was incredible,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting anyone to find them or look at them. I was just doing it for me and my kids, but all of a sudden I started getting views!”

In 2009, Sharpie contacted David and asked to feature his work on their blog. After that, different bloggers reached out to him, and the exposure he got was unstoppable.

“In November 2012, I probably I had 100,000 views total in four years,” he says. “Then I started getting noticed more and more and in February of 2013, it got doubled to 600,000. It’s just incredible!”

Amid all the attention, David says what means the most are the nostalgic comments he receives from viewers.

“The sandwich bags are something that my boys and I share together,” David says. “But the comments people leave about a parent doing something similar really touches me, because there are other parents that love their kids just as much. And they love them enough to leave a little note, a little whatever it may be… that’s just something that brightens their day when they get to their lunch.”

Visit David’s photostream to see more of his photography.

Do you want to be featured on The Weekly Flickr? We are looking for your photos that amaze, excite, delight and inspire. Share them with us in the The Weekly Flickr Group, or tweet us at #theweeklyflickr.

http://jessfink.com/kwe/

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I admit it: I was a hot avocado snob. Look around you, I'm sure you know one. I'm talking about people who scoff at the idea of serving avocado at any temperature other than cool. People who hear of tempura-fried avocado and sneer in disgust. Those who would mini-puke at the very thought of putting guacamole into the center of a grilled cheese sandwich.

Perhaps there are some for whom warm avocado really does have the bitter flavor that some folks claim it does, but I think for most warm avocado-haters (my former self included), the symptoms are largely psychosomatic.

I started down my long journey from rejecting to embracing warm avocados in Colombia, where my wife's aunt served us ajiaco, a Colombian soup made with potatoes and chicken and served with chunks of avocado stirred into the hot broth (recipe here). Avocado-in-hot-soup is a common feature all over Colombia. You'll see it stirred into frijoles, or into mondongo, a tripe stew from Medellín.

I've since had it deep-fried tempura style (delicious), grilled (phenomenal), and split in half, stuffed with meat and cheese, breaded and fried (meh). Point is, I got over my warm avocado aversion, and perhaps so can you.

I can think of no better way to do it than with this sandwich, which combines the warm, gooey, crisp, buttery comfort of a grilled cheese with the creamy tang of guacamole.

I've always wondered what it'd be like to make a grilled cheese sandwich in which not only were all four sides of the bread slices buttered (you do toast all four surfaces of your bread when making grilled cheese, right?), but the cheese slices were buttered too.

My hedonism knows few bounds, but buttering cheese might be one of them. As we all know, avocados are the butter of the plant kingdom, so this sandwich is the next best thing. And it's easy for us to fool ourselves into even believing it's healthy, what with its greenness and good fats and all. Right?

Serve some extra guacamole on the side to make the whole thing extra healthy.

I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I'd place good odds on this being one of the best things ever.

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Grilled Cheese with Guacamole »

More Grilled Cheese!

Serious Eats' Classic Grilled Cheese Sandwich »

Cheese-Coated Crisp Grilled Cheese Sandwich »

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

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