• Open-face sandwiches, from Scrambled Egg and Smoked Salmon to Herring with Apple and Cucumber.
• Behind the scenes of the Bueno Queso Social Club.
• Couples like to go to culinary school.
• Kitchen tips and tricks, including ideas for baking blueberry pie and selecting fresh fish.
• What's your favorite Halloween candy?
• What's the hip new coffee place in Boston?
• Roasting a pig: forget the spit and get a box.
• This week's recipes: Pasta with Bell Peppers and Ham, Baked Beans, Big Blue Slaw, and Pears Poached in Red Wine.

I'd wager that more than one food blogger - excluding those who are already pro chefs in some capacity - have considered going to culinary school. With the rise of Food TV and the ever-increasing interest in cooking, it's likely than many of you readers have had the same thought. How can you tell if culinary school is the right decision for you? The answer is that you can't. The only real way to know if it is for you, whether you are a student just finishing high school or someone with an established career and looking for a change a bit later in life, is to do as much research as you can and to go for it if it still seems like the right thing to do.

Doing the research usually means talking to schools, reading lots of literature, working (possibly for free) in real kitchens to see how they operate and what the work environments after school might be like. Don't just look out for what you want to hear; look for the potential downsides so that you know what you're headed for with both eyes open.

A great place to start is with the sound advice of David Lebovitz, who says that "Should I go to culinary school?" is one of the most frequently asked questions that he gets. He wrote up a little overview of some of the questions you need to ask yourself before you take the plunge.

One of the pastry classes at the Oregon Coast Culinary Institute took on a big task this year. They learned how to recreate preservative-laden childhood favorites without using the preservatives or the machines that are typically used to engineer candies like gummy worms, Zingers and lollipops. And then they made them giant.

At their final exhibition, there were cupcakes and candies that would have fit in perfectly at Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Perhaps the most impressive was the creation made by Brandon Finley: a giant tootsie pop. Pictured here, the lollipop weighed more than 40 pounds and used a 24-inch french rolling pin as a "stick." The chocolate tootsie center weighed about 15 pounds alone. Finley said that he had planned to make the confection larger, but the school actually ran out of sugar after the other students finished their projects and Finley used more that 25 pounds of it in his.

I wonder how many licks it took to get to the center of that pop.

[Image The Worldlink]