Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

To skin, or not to skin: Do you eat the delicious skins on your baked potato?

With high school graduations right around the corner, YumSugar comes to the rescue with a whole party menu.

Is it possible to be too controlled? The Obamas are under fire for dining decisions that are "too political."

How do little guys eat so much? Tiny Takeru Kobayashi is the pizza king after downing 5 3/4 Pizza Hut P'zones for the top prize in battle pizza.

Be still our cheesy heart -- a reader recipe for Chicken Parmesan.

Want to pre-prepare a tossed salad without sacrificing its crispness? Layer it early with the juicier ingredients on the bottom and toss it right before eating.

Forget the roast beast, it's time to roast beets!

American Joey Chestnut won the annual Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest today at Coney Island. He got down 66 hot dogs and rolls in 12 minutes. But defending champ Takeru Kobayashi, even though he was injured with a sore jaw and pain from an extracted wisdom tooth, still gave Chestnut some competition. He ate 63 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes, his best showing ever but not enough to beat the new champ.

Hopefully you read this after you had your Fourth of July hot dogs. Congratulations Joey!

In the Krystal Square Off III World Hamburger Eating Contest in Chattanooga, Tennessee this past weekend, Takeru Kobayashi brought home another championship title by eating 97 hamburgers in 8 minutes. Joey Chestnut came in second, finishing with 91 hamburgers, followed by Patrick Bertoletti in third with 76. All the numbers are up hugely from last year's contest, in which Kobayashi narrowly beat Chestnut with a final total of 67-62 burgers. One other big change from previous years was that the contest was televised on ESPN2, which gives the sport a much wider audience and much more publicity than it enjoyed before.

The contest is known as the "square off" because the burgers that the competitors wolf down are square, but Krystal's burgers hosts the contest because they have been holding eating contests at their stores since the first one opened in 1932. According to company legend, the tradition was set when the second customer challenged the first customer to a head-to-head hamburger showdown.

One Johnsonville Bratwurst weighs about 85 grams (3-oz. or 0.2-lbs.). We already know that Takeru Kobayashi set a new world record by eating 58 brats, sans buns, last weekend, but how does this compare to what a real person - i.e. a non-competitive eater - can eat? The St. Paul Pioneer wondered the same thing. Instead of taking the boring route and surveying people around the office, they tracked down some big eaters and asked the Minnesota Vikings' offensive line how much they thought they could eat. Even with an average weight of 245.8-lbs, compared to Kobayashi's 160-lbs., and the appetites to match the amount of energy they use on the field, most of the players said that they could eat fewer than a half-dozen of the sausages. The tackle, Mike Rosenthal, joked that he could eat 60, but every player said that there was no way they could do it in that time limit of 10 minutes.

Say what you will about competitive eating as a sport, but it clearly takes a specific set of skills to do it.

Already the master of hot dog eating, competitive eating superstar Takeru Kobayashi set a new world record with a different kind of sausage: bratwurst. He ate 58 bratwursts in 10 minutes, smashing the previous record of only 34 1/2 brats. He said that he really liked the brats, but they were a little harder to eat than hot dogs are, most likely this is because the dogs are eaten with buns, while the brats involve more chewing. Joey Chestnut, considered to be one of the up and coming stars of the sport, came in second with only 45 brats. The IFCOE has a breakdown of the prize money from the contest, revealing that Kobayashi took home $8,000 for his work.

And for anyone who's counting, the 160-lb Kobayashi ingested 16,820 calories, 1,450 grams of fat, along with 19 days' worth of the recommended (minimum) daily amount of sodium.

The folks over at Gothamist decided to liveblog the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog contest, which is fortunate for everyone who wasn't able to make it out to Coney Island today to watch in person. They reported that, after a grueling 12 minute battle, Takeru Kobayashi emerged victorious with a new world record of 54 hot dogs! That breaks his previous record of 53 1/2.

If you recall from earlier, this means that Kobayashi ate more than 16,500 calories in that short time period. Is it worth it? Well, not only does the winner get the glory of being the most recognized eater in the world, but he (Kobayashi, in this case) gets to take home the mustard-yellow championship belt for another year.

Update: You can view a videoclip here.