[The Roots and Grubs T-shirt Emporium](http://zazzle.com/mamster*)

This is a great day for civilization in general and Roots and Grubs readers in particular. The shirts are here!

Two designs are available, and you can get each in a huge variety of styles and colors, including baby and child sizes. You can even get organic cotton.

The “faces” logo was designed by Eric Zirkle and Dana Craig Zirkle. The “silverware” logo was designed by [Misty Granade](http://granades.com/). All of whom rock.

Note that you can get either logo in a full-shirt format or lapel size. Roll over the shirts in the gallery to see what I mean. (Also, the small-logo shirts have “small” in the name.)

Both of these logos will work best on a light-colored shirt. If you try ordering a black shirt and they look all psychedelic, well, welcome to That 70s Shirt.

Enjoy!

This week on [Serious Eats](http://www.seriouseats.com/):

[Cooking with kids: A food-related board game](http://www.seriouseats.com/required_eating/2007/09/cooking-with-kids.html)

> Iris wants to be the cupcake chef every time. I like the stir-fried noodle chef, although the sliced scallions look more than a little like eyeballs. Every time I pull the soy sauce tile, Iris, who has been known to steal tofu from my pad Thai, says, “No, that’s fish sauce.” The best part of Crazy Chefs is when Iris pulls a tile she doesn’t need for her card and notices that Mom or Dad needs it. “Hmm…I don’t need red onions,” she’ll say slyly, replacing the tile.

I’m at Shinka Tea, a new tea shop on Olive Way that opened last week. They specialize in flavored and sweetened teas but were happy to make me a cup of genmaicha for $2. More teas are on the way, the owner told me. Bubble tea is also available, and I promised Iris she could try a bubble tea ball soon. The wi-fi is solid. They’ve given the space a nice Japanese minimalism.

Not that I would try to lure anyone away from [Remedy Teas](http://www.remedyteas.com/), but this place is empty. Nice for me, since I don’t feel guilty about using it as my office and making phone calls, but not so nice for them. 1703 E Olive Way at Boylston.

No, not [that](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair) kind of fabricator.

Last night I was making a recipe (a streamlined coq au vin from [Cook’s Illustrated](http://www.cooksillustrated.com)) calling for boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Chicken thighs are one of my favorite ingredients. In their bone-in, skin-on form, they require almost no prep and you can marinate and roast them or brown them and make a stew. The boneless ones are easy to slice for enchilada filling or stir-fry, or grind to make meatballs. And they’re required for chicken satay.

Naturally, QFC was out of boneless thighs. They carry four different brands and were out of all of them. Was there a run on chicken thighs? The great chicken thigh panic of 2007? I thought about making something else for dinner, but I had coq au vin on my mind and most of the rest of the ingredients in my fridge.

Then I realized: hey, who is the cook here? They had bone-in thighs. I bought eight of those and steeled my boning knife. I had my boneless, skinless thighs before the wine was done reducing for the braising liquid, plus a snack of crispy chicken skin while no one was looking. By the time I boned the last one, I was pretty good at it.

For turning drudgery into a hobby, this sets a new standard.

**Historical note:** My band Cat Piss Lint Trap had a song called “Boning the Chicken” in 1996.

I’m pretty good at getting out of Whole Foods without too many impulse buys, but what was I supposed to do about this?

Yes, it’s a chocolate bar with bacon. I knew the price would be absurd, but obviously I’d put an unneeded limb on eBay to get it.

The bar turned out to be $7, and it’s *fantastic*. The bacon is not just a gimmick. They manage to keep the bacon crunchy, and it also has smoked salt in it. I would eat this bar every day.

Once I was writing an article in which I explained that I’d found a bacon-enhanced recipe for scallion pancakes but was passing it by because scallion pancakes were perfectly good without bacon. Casting about for a comparison, I said, “I’d probably eat tarte tatin with bacon.” That was before Amanda Hesser wrote an item for the New York Times entitled “Who put the pancetta in the apple tart? Good move.” Now, I’m trying to think of *something* that I would actually be averse to putting bacon in, and I can’t think of anything.

I guess it’s true what they say.