Williams-Sonoma

Handmade chicken coop

Williams-Sonoma brings to mind beautiful china, gourmet kitchen tools and pricey pots and pans. Chicken coops? Not so much.

But handmade hen houses are part of a new line of home and garden goods, launched last spring. The avian abodes are made by several vendors, including Laughing Chickens, a Northern California company.

"Our agrarian collection offers products that support a lifestyle of healthy living and brings the virtues of homegrown and homemade into our customers' everyday lives," a Williams-Sonoma spokesperson told us in an email.

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T. Nguyen

Huevos rancheros at The Alcove

Fried eggs and buttered toast is the Tim Duncan of breakfasts in that it's generally very reliable, if not a little boring. Give us fried eggs on top of fried tortillas topped with rancheros sauce and salsa on almost any morning though, and it's a whole new ballgame. Thankfully, huevos rancheros are standard fare on most breakfast menus across town; for this Food Fight, Team Alcove Cafe squares off against Team El Huarachito to see which restaurant makes the better version of this classic Mexican breakfast.

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M. Rochlin

The McDonald's sign at Venice & Overland

It may be a signal that the infrastructure of Los Angeles is further declining. Or that the recent wild Santa Anas blew further west than initially thought. Or maybe this McDonald's sign, on the corner of Venice and Overland in Culver City, is instead a visual signal of the fast food company's new attempts at inclusiveness and celebrity management. Although "llions served" could mean any number of things, from wild game burgers to safari animals in the Happy Meals to an actual zoo instead of a Playland out back.

McDonald's recently came under fire for using an egg supplier that was charged with animal cruelty -- the company dropped the supplier -- and yesterday a handful of celebrities wrote a letter to Jim Skinner, the CEO of McDonald's, urging the company to use 100% cage-free eggs, as they do in Europe. Because if Ryan Gosling, Alicia Silverstone and Zooey Deschanel (nope, Matt Damon was not one of the writers) wanted you to do something responsible, wouldn't you?

kjetil_r/flickr

Eggs, frying

Ever since Aristotle wandered the supermarkets, philosophers and scientists have been wondering which came first: the chicken or the egg. Aristotle went with both, saying neither could have preceded the other. Around 2000 years later, Stephen Hawking favored the egg.

However, when it comes to Tuesday afternoon's news that corporate behemoths Kellogg Co., General Mills Inc., Kraft Foods Inc. and Nestle SA have sued eleven big-league American egg producers for supposedly "conspiring" to control the prices and supply of their mass-produced chicken eggs, you don't need a causality dilemma to see which way the yolk is sliding. Something smells rotten, and we're not sure what it is.

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Guzzle & Nosh

A pickled egg from Philippe the Original.

Just because it's so weird and beautiful, because it's so wrong it's right, because that shade of magenta is so rarely associated with any naturally originated food, today's Photo of the Day is the pickled egg from Philippe the Original, where it sits in a massive countertop jar with its brethren, the trophies of some intergalactic serial killer plucking alien eyeballs from his vividly hued victims.

And a reminder that if you have any brilliant shots of food you've taken around town recently, you might consider uploading them on our LA Weekly Flickr pool. Never know where they might show up.

D. Gonzalez

Mr "G" Migas at Nick's Taste of Texas

Trends aren't always a bad thing. Of course, we aren't talking about overly precious mini-cupcake-on-a-stick trends. But the kind where we all benefit, like one that has chilaquiles popping up on brunch menus through out the city. Jar in West Hollywood, Local in Silver Lake and The Restaurant at the Getty Center, which makes an excellent duck confit version. Another positive effect of this chilaquile showboating is that their Tex-Mex cousin, migas, are also starting to appear on more menus. So lately we have been spent our breakfasts getting to know this Tex-Mex classic.

Because it needs to be said, migas are not chilaquiles. In separate entries in his The Tex-Mex Cookbook, chronicler of Tex-Mex cuisine, Rob Walsh delineates the difference between the two: chilaquiles are tortillas, crisped and cooked in salsa. Migas are tortillas, crisped and cooked with eggs. Egg can be added to chilaquiles. And salsa can be added to migas after the egg is set. Just don't try to pass one for the other to a homesick Texan. You have been warned.

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The Cornucopia Institute

Ever lost your mind standing in front of a chilly, carton-stuffed refrigerator case, trying to decide which organic eggs belong in your Sunday morning omelets? If your standards for sustainability, safety, and humane rearing conditions are silo-high, you might want to consider skimming The Cornucopia Institute's handy Organic Egg Scorecard. Elkhorn Organics in Prunedale, St. John Family Farms in Orland, and Full Circle Dairy in Denair are among the California farms earning highest marks.

Breakfast burritos have a special place in the hearts of college students. There are times when you desperately need a heavy, filling breakfast on a Saturday or Sunday morning, but the idea of handling silverware and a plate seems like far too Herculean an effort. Enter the breakfast burrito: your morning meal wrapped in a tortilla, and often accompanied by a much-needed bottle of hot sauce. You can eat it hunched over a greasy table, in front of the T.V., or in especially dire cases, in bed. One of our old favorites comes from The Cantina, in UCSB-adjacent Goleta: a vegetarian delight comprised of potatoes, eggs, sour cream, cheese, rice, and salsa. But Los Angeles has college students (and others who love the things) too, so we went out to see what we could find.

N. Galuten

Lucky Boy breakfast burrito

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From the A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words category. When it's a good cartoon, of course, that number goes up exponentially, especially when you add the few words in the cartoon itself. Matt Davies is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for The Journal News. You should probably know that.

Matt Davies/The Journal News

"Clucked"

Flickr/stevendepolo

Deviled eggs

Our egg problem is still going strong. MSNBC is reporting that over a half-billion eggs have been recalled, and even more could be on the horizon. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that new egg safety rules were only recently put into place and, had they been implemented earlier, "could have prevented" the salmonella outbreak.

One of the main issues, the Wall Street Journal tells us, comes from jurisdictional overlap between the FDA and the USDA. Under the new rules, the two groups "share responsibility to inspect egg manufacturers."

To stay informed, and to find out how to check egg cartons, consumers have been advised to visit the FDA's food safety website.