arnold | inuyaki/Flickr

Kyochon's fried chicken

​In our last handy food flowchart, we tried to point you in the right direction for those times when you just need a bowl of phở to comfort your soul. Today, our flowchart helps you navigate the city when you're in search of another type of comforting soul food: fried chicken. And because sometimes you want that chicken with a side of kimchi pancakes or Japanese pub grub, we threw in a few suggestions that will satisfy your craving by way of Koreatown or the local izakaya.

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Joséphine Runneboom/Flickr

Alone at The Biltmore Hotel

​"A is for dining alone," M.F.K. Fisher wrote in An Alphabet for Gourmets, "...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself." We feel ya, Fisher.

Like Fisher, we would much rather dine alone, or not at all, if the alternative is being forced to indulge some twat droning on and on about their so-called life, or to endure that awkward moment when all diners' shared interests have been thoroughly hashed and it's not even dessert yet.

Poor Fisher found 1949 Los Angeles a bit hostile to the idea of a woman eating alone in a restaurant. While some restaurants today still aren't quite optimal for singles -- dishes served family-style, for example, or tables so uncomfortably big that you feel like Edith Ann -- Fisher nonetheless would have been in a good company of misanthropes, introverts, alone-but-not-lonelies who eat alone, and eat well, in the city. In no particular order, here are our favorite spots to dine alone. Comfortably. Happily. Shamelessly.

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R.E.~/Flickr

Cupcakes were one of the most Googled terms of 2011

​Much to our chagrin, the cupcake is a trend that just won't die: according to Google's 2011 Year-End Zeitgeist, cupcakes were one of the most popular Food and Drink search terms of the year. Other fascinating revelations about our food-related search engine habits: everyone in the world was constantly on the hunt for pizza, and Canadians sure do love making pork tenderloins.

As it has done every year since 2001, Google analyzed the billions of the terms that we users typed into its search box in 2011, filtered out spam and constructed "lists that best reflects the spirit of the times." Most of the search terms are ranked by popularity, though a few lists reflect the "fastest rising" searches - that is, the most popular queries in a particular category are compared to their popularity last year, then ranked based on their increase in search volume.

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Flickr/Kyle Strickland

In-N-Out Double-Double

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With the mass exodus of thousands of UCLA graduates from their picturesque Westwood neighborhood -- picturesque if you've always envisioned a neighborhood where you'd search 30 minutes for a parking space before giving up, or if you've dreamed all your life of waking up at 8 a.m. to someone blasting Rihanna songs about S&M -- we not only say goodbye to our miniature apartments, we say goodbye to our favorite restaurants. The ones that we'll see on Alumni Day ten years from now and fondly say, "Hey, I got really drunk there."

To bid a fond farewell to the overpopulated student jungle, turn the page for the top 5 Westwood dishes UCLA graduates will miss the most.

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southerbornandbredgirl/flickr

Fried chicken livers

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With food, one person's penance is another's pleasure. Many parents view dinner-time as an opportunity, not just to share food and company with their beloved offspring, but also to exert control. Sometimes kids are picky and sometimes parents are very, very cruel. Especially concerning liver. Read on as Squid Ink contributors shudder down memory lane back to most unappetizing dishes their parents forced them to eat. It goes without saying that some of these dishes no longer evoke the horror they once did. [Editor's note: Sure they do.]

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Flickr/mollyali

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If you've ever spent hours in the kitchen, your cookbooks open or -- more likely these days -- your recipe printed out from an online source, only to find that your dishes do not turn out exactly how you'd expected, keep reading. That maxim not to believe everything you read also applies to recipes, which are often not tested by professionals. More and more these days, with test kitchens closing and publishers cutting budgets and bloggers posting untested recipes online (like the chef recipes you read on this blog), recipes are not guaranteed to work.

And sometimes they don't anyway: this writer once stubbornly baked a génoise cake from a celebrated baking book 9 times before figuring out that the math hadn't been properly translated in the cookbook recipe from grams to ounces. Or check out the appropriately named Chocolate Nemesis, which has a pretty lousy track record too.

Unexpected results, as this recent post by The Kitchn deftly pointed out -- a great post, an excellent reminder, and the catalyst for this piece -- can be due to many things. Ovens need to be calibrated, recipes need to be followed, and any change of variable in turn changes the recipe itself. Want to insure that your recipes work? For our top 7 ways to keep your génoise cake from crashing, turn the page.

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​Saint Valentine's Day is coming up, a holiday meant to commemorate your love through the purchase of mass produced greeting cards, written by someone who probably hates her job. It is also a very big night in the restaurant business, with most restaurants in the country being forced to contrive a romantic, fixed price menu for two. But in reality, going out on February 14th (or even a few of the surrounding days) is an often terrible idea. In light of that, we present our Top 5 Reasons to Stay Home and Cook on Valentine's Day.

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Sifu Renka/Flickr

Don't call it voluptuous.

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Meat may or may not be murder, but descriptions of it certainly murder plenty of restaurant reviews. In general, food can be challenging to describe, particularly for lazy writers. After all, there are only so many ways to inform readers that the bottom of a pizza crust was "crispy" without using the word "crispy." You have to actually think about the moment your teeth bit into it. Was it like matzoh? The outside of a baguette? A pig's ear? Sheet-rock?

We admit we're not perfect. On the occasions we've been too drunk to recall the details of a meal or failed to jot down notes between bites, we ourselves have resorted to such bland, unspecific descriptives. We also understand that, for non-lazy writers, the search for inspiring adjectives to pipe into descriptions of food never stops, and sometimes leads us down precarious semantic paths. However, we draw the line when it comes to modifying meat. A "crispy" pizza doesn't offend much, but a piece of meat, sauced, so to speak, with an unbecoming adjective, is a wrecking ball for the appetite. Behold, our impossibly subjective Top 5 Words Restaurant Reviewers Should Stop Using To Describe Meat:

5. Morsel: This may not seem so bad, but we once had an editor who insisted, without explanation, on changing every "piece" and "bite" we wrote to "morsel." As if making that adjustment more thoroughly conveyed the unbearable delicacy and delightfulness of what we were describing. Weirdly, the word makes us think of besuited mice nibbling at pieces of cheese in broken traps.

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Flickr user Photography_1O1

Is your meat being stored at the appropriate temperature?

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It is National Food Safety Education Month, because everyone knows that the best way to deal with a serious issue is to give it its own month. We also love giving out National Days (yesterday was National Cream-Filled Donut Day, today is National Felt Hat Day), but those were invented (we're almost certain) by monkeys throwing darts at a wall of random objects.

But unlike National Hot Breakfast Month, this one is actually important. In fact, it is so important that it often gets in the way of good cooking. The U.S. government is more concerned with foodborne illness than they are with a dry turkey breast, and you definitely won't find a recipe for how to make your own sour cream on the FDA website. Actually, their food safety site is in many ways an Orwellian guide to overcooking, and a manifesto on the virtues of pasteurization. That is why proper cooking and careful work habits should go hand in hand -- the goal isn't just survival, but enjoyment too. Turn the page for our Top 10 Kitchen Safety Tips:

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Trader Joe's is really inexpensive. To be honest, it is at times somewhat frighteningly so. But we continue to shop there, mainly because of those low prices, their large wine selection, snappy packaging and generally friendly staff. It is a brand we've come to trust, without ever really stopping to figure out why. We go back no matter how crowded the parking lots become, and despite the knowledge that their dairy and produce seem to go bad a lot more quickly than they ought to. We continue to purchase their seafood, even though Greenpeace graded their seafood sustainability a solid F, below Target and Walmart and Costco.

So why do we go back? Because it's cheap, and because it is convenient. Bachelors who would never be caught dead eating a Swanson fried fish stick dinner can be found perusing the TJ's frozen food section for ten minutes at a time, reading the descriptions on a package of steamer clams in garlic butter sauce. So in honor of mankind's odd relationship with Trader Joe's, the company which can apparently do no wrong, we present our list of the 5 Most Disgusting Items In The Trader Joe's Freezer Aisle.

N. Galuten

Because we apparently need souffle faster and worse

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