The Chef: Doug Sohn (Hot Doug’s) They look strange, too. “They have this sort of human element because they have little fingernails on them, so they look like shriveled-up, deformed hands,” Sohn says. One of the most common uses for chicken feet is stock. He’s also eaten them at Asian restaurants, both deep-fried and stir-fried. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What to do with the feet was fairly obvious to Sohn—he is, after all, Hot Doug....

The Chef: Joseph Rose (Lockwood)The Challengers:Thomas Rice and Kurt Guzowski (Tete Charcuterie)The Ingredient: Smen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Smen is traditionally made from goat butter, sheep butter, or a combination of the two that’s been aged between one and four months—though it can be kept much longer. Berber farmers in Morocco reportedly bury a jar of smen when a daughter is born and dig it up on her wedding day to season the food served at the celebration....

Print and Deliver —Chilibob Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Trib delivery is our source of daily print on the doorstep, too. The mystery to me is why they apparently feel no urgency whatsoever to deliver before about 7:30 AM, usually well after my neighbors have begun slogging to work. I suppose this could explain in part why the paper guy has to toss only about half a dozen copies total in a block densely packed with courtyard condo buildings....

QHere is my question for you, Mr. Savage: My girlfriend and I are sexually active, and I can get an erection in the beginning, a fully hard erection, but a few minutes into intercourse, I start to lose my erection. Intercourse feels amazing, it’s just that after a while I start to lose my erection. I can get my erection back if I allow my girlfriend to use her hand on it for a while....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Warriors who are not insane understand that war presents them with a choice between greater and lesser evils. The greater evil is defeat. But the lesser evil, killing — killing civilians, among others — is bad enough. McCain endorses the viewpoint of his father, who as a submarine commander during World War II “executed his country’s policy of total war, a policy that attacked the sources of the enemy’s material support just as vigorously as it attacked the enemy’s armed forces....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Milwaukee’s Miller Park is a fine home away from home for Chicago’s baseball fans. Like Milwaukee itself, it’s friendly and inviting, big but not too big, and with a pleasantly diminished volume level compared with our ballparks — and our city. The stadium has its idiosyncracies: three Harley-Davidson motorcycles (a local source of civic pride) lined up just below where Bernie Brewer goes down the slide on Milwaukee homers, pom-pom girls (there are no cheerleaders in baseball!...

You might have missed it with all the hubbub over Chick-fil-A, but last month Mayor Rahm Emanuel teamed up with Alderman Joe Moore, of all people, to temporarily stall the elected school board movement. Then they sit there stone-faced, barely pretending to give a shit, while outraged parents, teachers, and students show up to board hearings to howl in protest. Meanwhile, the mayor says it would be a mistake to inject politics into the board of education....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are loads of trivial variations from list to list, which makes the annual glut increasingly harder to mull over. But I remain, among many other critics and cinephiles, compelled (and required) to contribute. So here they are, my 10 favorite films that had a week-long commercial release in either New York or LA: 2013 was a surprisingly strong year for independent American filmmaking: Matt Porterfield and Andrew Bujalski, two of the most exciting young directors we have in this country, took major steps forward, as did the not-so-young Dan Sallitt, who directed one of the most complex and mesmerizing character studies of the year....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider the results of a poll conducted last weekend and reported Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. There’s a reductio ad absurdum quality to the central question Pew asked, which was this: “As you may know, the government is potentially investing billions to try and keep financial institutions and markets secure. Do you think this is the right thing or the wrong thing for the government to be doing?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The good people at Bell’s Brewery have been releasing commemorative beers in their Batch series for about 20 years. At first, when their output was modest, they might make one to mark a 500-batch milestone, but in the mid-90s they dialed back to every 1,000 batches. This year they’re wrapping up the series on a nice round number: Batch 10,000....

Already known as an actor (King of Queens, Big Fan) and a rat (the voice of Remy the rodent chef in the 2007 animated Pixar hit Ratatouille), comedian Patton Oswalt is now an author, too. Like his stand-up, Oswalt’s first book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (Scribner), is a self-deprecating mishmash of musings on growing up outside Washington, D.C., the often vapid early-90s comedy scene, and his place in the great world of nerddom....

I grew up near Hamilton, Michigan. My father grew up in that area. He grew up on an industrial pickle farm. We had, when I was growing up, just under 400 acres that was mostly to pickles. So I grew up witnessing the farm because my dad was farming part-time. Both my parents were anesthesiologists. Abra Berens, 31, divides her time between professional Chicago kitchens like those at Floriole Cafe & Bakery and her Bare Knuckle Farm, 350 miles away on Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula....

Sleight of hand tends to suffer on the big screen because moviegoers are so accustomed to mechanical trickery—to make something disappear, all you really need is a good splice. But the magic in Deceptive Practice, Molly Bernstein’s documentary portrait of actor and stage illusionist Ricky Jay, comes mainly from Jay’s fond recollections of old performers. Grandson of an amateur stage magician, Jay made his own performing debut in 1953 at age seven, and through his childhood and teenage years in Brooklyn he met some of the master prestidigitators of vaudeville and early video—Cardini, Tony Slydini, Francis Carlyle, Al Flosso, Dai Vernon, Charlie Miller....

Q I’m sorry about sending this letter to you via snail mail. I don’t want to send an e-mail because I’d rather not have a record of this living forever on some server somewhere. Why do I get such a euphoric feeling when I pull the tampon out when I’m coming? Does it have something to do with my prostate? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A 1....

MAY Thu17 Get out of Dodge NATO’s coming, bringing foreign dignitaries and martial law. Get out while you still can: see our summer getaways for a few inspired ideas. Mon21 The Beach Boys 50th-anniversary tour The sounds of summer wouldn’t be complete without the Beach Boys, who hit the road in honor of a half century of warm, dreamy tunes. 5/21-5/22, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, www.chicagotheatre.com, $40-$250....

Sherlock Holmes movies are like city buses; you may miss one, but another will be following shortly. Since making his screen debut in 1905, Holmes has been the central character in about 150 theatrical and TV movies, portrayed by some 70 different actors (including Jonathan Pryce, Rupert Everett, Patrick Macnee, Charlton Heston, Edward Woodward, Michael Caine, Ian Richardson, Peter O’Toole, Frank Langella, Christopher Plummer, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Raymond Massey, and John Barrymore)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bartolotta declined and made his name opening San Domenico instead, before coming here to Spiaggia for several years in the early 90s. The two were already friends when they finally became colleagues, both opening restaurants at the Wynn in Las Vegas. Despite their long friendship, this will be Boulud’s first visit to Bartolotta’s hometown, and a rare touchdown in the midwest for him....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Police Department released data Monday confirming that crime citywide has increased from a year ago, including homicides, which are up 18 percent. Unless I missed it, no aldermen were outraged enough to call for hearings this time. Why would they? It’s August, the quiet time around City Hall. Plus, the spike in crime wasn’t unexpected; the numbers were trending upward at about the same rates last month and the month before that and the month before that....

Steve Jurvetson Barack Obama, circa ’08. When it comes to our annual Best of Chicago issue, we at the Reader strive to be as democratic as possible. That’s why we give you, the readers of the Reader, free rein to voice your opinions on everything from Best Alderman to Best Bike Shop, by way of a wide-open write-in ballot. This might not be the most convenient of methods—there’s quite a bit of tedious tallying required—but damn if it isn’t the most entertaining....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been pretty amazed by the variety and quality that the loose group of New York musicians affiliated with the Desco/Daptone Records juggernaut has maintained over the past decade, combining funk, Afrobeat, and hard soul. Flagship band the Dap-Kings have enhanced the already considerable appeal of singer Sharon Jones to the point that they’re headlining the Vic with her on Thursday (it wasn’t so long ago that they were playing the Double Door), and their members have also turned up in various combinations backing Amy Winehouse, Al Green, and Lily Allen, among others....