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The Washington Post's Jim Shahin is a barbecue alchemist. He takes an ordinary piece of meat, waves his hands over it (usually with salt and pepper in each fist), and sticks the protein into a black box. Hours later, from a thick plume of smoke, he'll pull out a blackened beauty glistening in its own sweat, as transfixing as a recently unearthed artifact. It will take all your willpower not to tear into the smoky flesh with both hands as Jim begins the painstakingly long process of letting his barbecued meats rest.

How do I know this? Jim is a friend. I've stood there in his kitchen countless times waiting over his carving board, hawk-like, so that he'll provide me with some small preview slice of brisket before the rest of the barbecue hits the table. So when he told me about his smoked turkey for Thanksgiving, I was all over it. I know the obsessiveness that goes into his barbecue.

I've got the smoker primed for Jim's preparation next week. It may not turn out as well as his, but it will be far superior to those oven-roasted yawners.

Don't feel like smoking? Here are some other non-traditional turkey recipes:

• Chow has the lowdown on how to deep-fry your bird, Southern-style.
• Francis Lam at Salon suggests cutting up your turkey and confiting the legs and thighs.
• Epicurious has put together a Mexican-style turkey recipe, complete with mole sauce and masa stuffing.
• Emeril adds a little Cajun spice to his Thanksgiving bird.
• And perhaps the strangest one of all: Serious Eats shares its recipe for buffalo fried turkey.

If you ask me what I remember from the Halloweens of my youth, it's always the candy. Not the costume, but the candy. In fact, as I'm writing this, I can't think of a single costume I wore as a kid, save for that ridiculous one-piece clown outfit that my grandmother had sewn for the family (and our mom made each of us kids wear at the appropriate age, as if it were a rite of passage to deal with the utter embarrassment of the damn thing).

Yes, Halloween was always about scoring candy. After our evening rounds, my older sister and I would spread out our loot on the living room floor and negotiate trades for the candies we liked. I always hated Sweet Tarts; those were easy to give up. Most of the miniature chocolate bars were non-negotiable; Three Musketeers, Baby Ruth, Nestle Crunch (especially Nestle Crunch!), and Snickers were my protected players. Mounds, Butterfingers, and Almond Joy were imminently tradable.  The candy corn were like minor league players; you might have to throw in a few to complete a trade.

Junk food was obviously my reason for wearing any clown outfit on Halloween. I've mostly given up junk food as an adult — although the occasional afternoon candy bar craving still hits — but I still associate Halloween with food. So do a lot of others, including chefs and bartenders.

After the jump, I've aggregated a number of Halloween recipes, events, odd-ball items, and party round-ups from around the web (thanks all for doing the work already!). Many of these dishes, recipes, and cocktails sound, alternately, funny and inventive and maybe even tasty (or nasty). Frankly, I miss the thrill of trick or treating for my haul.

• BrightestYoungThings has compiled a list of Halloween food events and scary cocktails.
• Speaking of scary cocktails, The Passenger has boiled up some hellish concoction called El Zombie, which the Brothers Brown will serve up to the brave (or foolish) during their Halloween Fiesta.
• Y&H's very own Stefanie Gans has compiled an extensive list of Halloween drinks for the occasion. Best cocktail name ever: Brain Hemorrhage.
• Metrocurean has a list of seven scary dishes to try.
• Serious Eats counts down the best and worst Halloween candies.
• Chow wants to help you dress as your favorite celebrity chef for Halloween. (If you go as Paula Deen, just make sure your pants fall down at some point.)
• Chow also suggests you make your own candy this year.
• Girl Meets Food has compiled a fairly comprehensive list of events under the  heading of Ghoul Meets Food.
• Twenty ways to cook a pumpkin from Epicurious.
• Food & Wine makes a skull cake.
• Metromix has your guide to the local party spots.

Photo by StarMama via Flickr Creative Commons, Attribution License

Video courtesy of Serious Eats.

People are pissed off about environmentally unfriendly plastic. But people are even more pissed off about the noise level of SunChips' new compostable bag, which the Wall Street Journal reports is as loud as a  jet cockpit, registering 95 decibels on a sound meter.

The inevitable Facebook group has emerged. Its name is in ALL CAPS, no doubt to emphasize the SHOUTING required to talk over a SunChips bag. SORRY BUT I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THIS SUN CHIPS BAG already has nearly 40,000 followers — or whatever Facebook calls these people now.

Over at Serious Eats, Y&H's friend Erin Zimmer has put together this video to give you an idea of exactly how loud the new bag is. You might want to grab earplugs first.

Y&H is old enough to remember drive-ins and some of the classic intermission advertisements that these operations showed between flicks. But Serious Eats has unearthed even older trailers dating back to when movie houses used to have intermissions.

These clips are delightfully cheesy. They make me wonder what Don Draper would think of them. Not much, I suspect.

Another classic trailer after the jump.

I have no idea what this line means, but it sounds vaguely suggestive: "Topped with Hollywood's SUPER-RICH COATING of the Kind You Like Best!"

More vintage trailers over at Serious Eats.

The mood over this season's Top Chef is turning dark. The critics are claiming the cheftestants (still can't stomach that word) are inferior to previous seasons. Hell, they can't even make a pie.

The media have their say:

• Joe Yonan and Bonnie Benwick over at WaPo, ahem, knead-le the chefs over their pies: "If you don't know how to make a basic pie crust, I think it's pretty sad," Yonan says. "They weren't even pies, most of them."
• Carol Blymire at the Washingtonian thought the producers teased us about the judges' favorite pies: "[T]hey love Kelly’s tart/pie and Stephen’s curried-apple pie. Johnny gets to reveal the winner, and I’m thinking either Kelly or Stephen, but instead he says, 'Kenny!' What? How can you win when you’re not featured in the Pies We Loved montage" (Also: Blymire gets the Y&H Bronze Medal for bravery for sneaking "dickwad" into the Washingtonian.)

• Eater national mocks Jean Georges pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini for channeling The Fonz: "Enough, Johnny. We get it. Even though you are a dessert chef and have a slight lisp, you call yourself "Johnny" and dress like a greaser. You're tough! No one is arguing! You probably gave yourself a tattoo in prison with a Bic and a lighter that says "Petit Four" across your knuckles! (One of his hands has six fingers.) Let's all just relax. I promise I won't try and steal your wallet."
• Serious Eats got fed up with all the complainin' about the pie challenge: "This week's quickfire didn't go so well for the chefs. You'd think Padma asked them to disarm a bomb with all the bitching and moaning they were doing: "Wahhh, I've never made a pie before! Wahhh, I don't cook desserts!" Suck it up, guys. The show is called Top Chef, not Top Incompetent Whiny Bitch."
• Gawker minces no words: "I suppose baking a pie is difficult for a chef. Pastry arts and culinary arts taught as two separate degrees at most culinary colleges, but man, these chefs suck balls!"
• Entertainment Weekly mocks a few of the contestants' approach to pie: "It took me seven hours to cook my first from-scratch blueberry pie last Thanksgiving (go ahead, ridicule), but in TC land, they had just two. And in those two hours, Ed ripped on Alex’s talent (Oh Ed, you know what that means for you, right?), Tracey dubbed her pie “top secret” because she actually didn’t know what she was making, and Angelo, out of convenience for his pie-less résumé, tricked his mind into thinking this was a curry challenge. That makes sense."
• DCist could see trouble coming from a mile away:  "It was pretty easy to spot some of the cheftestants who would not be in contention for immunity early on in the Quickfire. First, Alex was working on some sort of almond crust that looked like it had the consistency of Play-Doh that had its cap left off overnight. Also, he threw some sort of filling together with eggs and tapioca and goat cheese — I'm sorry, were you supposed to be making pies for Johnny Iuzzini to taste or pies that would ruin the afternoon of nursing home residents? Tapioca pie? With goat cheese? Pass."

If there was any theme to Wednesday night's episode of Top Chef D.C., it had to be this: Assistant White House chef Sam Kass is a total, to-die-for hunk, more than deserving of his spot on People magazine's list of the 100 most beautiful people.

Serious Eats found Kass good enough to eat: "This week on Top Chef DC, a bunch of people whose names I still don't know cooked a bunch of delicious looking food for a delicious looking man named Sam Kass (who just happens to be the assistant chef at the White House)."

Side Dish, the "daily destination for Dallas foodies," writes, "Before we get into the Quick Fire Challenge, let’s talk about our guest judge, Sam Kass, and why my new life goal is to date/marry him. First of all, he cooks for the president. No big deal. Secondly, he’s hot."

Eater thinks Kass is hot enough to make a straight man reconsider: "Our chefs file in for the Quickfire and see this week's guest judge, Assistant White House Chef Sam Kass. Woah! Was Michelle in charge of this hire? I am a straight man, I am just saying I don't think there is a place on that guy where you couldn't crack a walnut, am I right? (No locavoro.)"

We Love DC was "busy staring at [Kass] wondering if it would be possible to get trapped in an elevator with both him and Tom."

Entertainment Weekly is ready to make Kass a regular: "Side note: Does anyone else think Kass would make a rather handsome and astute regular judge? There’s something about his shaved head and him telling Kenny that a tomato is actually a fruit… it was working for me."

OpenTable's Dining Check can see the cracks in the handsome veneer: "Tonight’s guest judge is Sam Kass, who is the assistant White House chef. He’s nice to look at, but he’s not all that nice to the contestants, as you’ll see."

BrightestYoungThings tones down the Kass commentary just a touch: "Also, Eric Rippert is too French to deal with American cafeterias so he is nowhere to be found and we're stuck looking at Sam Kass' pursed lips and shiny shaven head and classic cheekbones that make him resemble a younger, handsomer Yul Brinner for the rest of the episode."

God bless Carol Blymire over at the Washingtonian for going against the grain on Kass: "As the judges saunter in, it hits me: no Eric Ripert in this episode? We’re stuck with Sam Kass the whole time? Boooooooo, Bravo. Booooooooooo *pause to take a breath* ooooooooooooooooooo."

As if Al Gore's documentary, or even his divorce, didn't shake our faith in humanity enough, now we have this:  the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is designed to protect us from our own stupidity. You know, like global warming and nuclear war.

It's a seed vault buried inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen (retirement home to all former MLB players, I've heard), high enough to avoid the flood waters of melting ice caps and deep enough in the earth to survive Ahmadinejad's "peaceful" nuclear program.

The video above comes from National Geographic and it's worth a watch, even if it's a little perky for such a grim subject.  A tip of the hat to Serious Eats for alerting us to the video.

It's amazing that it took this long, but Fox is scheduled to air a new series next year devoted, in part, to the dish that everyone loves to talk about — the all-American hamburger. Bob's Burgers focuses on a hapless family running a hapless burger joint. Serious Eats has more information and more videos on the show.