And (RELEVANCE ALERT) both movies feature painstakingly-described onscreen recipes for pasta sauce.

In the NFL, when two teams tie for a playoff spot, the league uses a system of 12 tiebreaking procedures, each becoming less significant than the previous one (head-to-head record, strength of the opponents you played, the most touchdowns you scored) until finally, if teams match up perfectly on the first eleven, the 12th is a coin toss.

The way I see it, we’re at the eleventh tiebreaker right now - the Goodfellas/Godfather question is so close to call that we’re fast approaching coin-flip territory. So I decided to do what any cook in my position would do: make film history.

I’ve made both, made a hybrid or three, and tomorrow night will launch off into new experimentation — using bison or ostrich, using a different pasta, switching up the cooking times. Whatever hits me as I’m at the supermarket.

For the record, to my taste, the Godfather sauce was better, save for it being overly sweet. My later tests and hybrids ditched Clemenza’s sugar, and it worked out very nicely.

That being said, Vinnie’s addition of some onions ain’t bad, but he uses too many onions. (I used one Vidalia. It was enough!)

The biggest issue, if you can dig it, is whether to brown the meatballs and sausage or cook them in the sauce. People get derpy over this. SRSLY. (My mom is adamant that you have to brown the meat before it goes into the sauce. She yelled at me when I told her about the preliminary Goodfellas experiment. Out of character, to say the least!)

I’ve tried both separately, and together (in the hybrids).

I gotta come down on the Godfather side here: brown your meat.

And de-glaze, for Jebus Haploid Christ’s sake! Preferably with a decent red wine; don’t splash it in like Clemenza does. Put the de-glazing fluid and yummy bits right into the sauce. (Me, I’d use a decent but affordable Chianti or Merlot, but pick what’s best for you.)

It makes a huge difference in the umami flavor.

Lastly, pasta choice: Don’t use delicate pasta for this — no angel hair, even no linguine or spaghetti. (Screw Coppola on this point*.)

Go with bowties, fettuccine, cavatappi, rigatoni, penne… You want a solid pasta for this sauce; otherwise, when the sauce overwhelms the pasta, you have stew.

More: The Godfather-Goodfellas Pasta Sauce Smackdown

Also, Charles, there’s no Food category. I pine, because I want to see some of VB’s recipes she’s always flaunting!

* Granted, Coppola was probably thinking of fresh, homemade pasta (which has different characteristics from mass-produced boxed pasta) which is not always easily available today. Salt this opinion liberally.

I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter

YOU. Girl with the notebook. Out.”

It was only my first day on the job as a cookbook ghostwriter, shadowing a top-flight chef, when the owner of a Chicago restaurant threw me out of the kitchen. I realized then that what had seemed like a dream job — helping restaurant chefs translate their culinary genius to the printed page — would hold more humiliations than I’d imagined.

Despite that inauspicious start, I wrote nine cookbooks and many other chefs’ projects over the next five years, some credited but most anonymous. Like many others in the nebulous profession called food writing, I was really a food ghost — one of the ink-stained (and grease-covered) wretches who actually produce most of the words that are attributed to chefs in cookbooks and food magazines and on Web sites.

Many real-world cooks have wondered at the output of authors like Martha Stewart, Paula Deen and Jamie Oliver, who maintain cookbook production schedules that boggle the mind. Rachael Ray alone has published thousands of recipes in her cookbooks and magazine since 2005. How, you might ask, do they do it?

The answer: they don’t. The days when a celebrated chef might wait until the end of a distinguished career and spend years polishing the prose of the single volume that would represent his life’s work are gone. Recipes are product, and today’s successful cookbook authors are demons at providing it — usually, with the assistance of an army of writer-cooks.

“The team behind the face is invaluable,” said Wes Martin, a chef who has developed recipes for Ms. Ray and others. “How many times can one person invent a new quick pasta dish?”

Mr. Martin, and dozens of others like him, have a particular combination of cooking skills, ventriloquism and modesty that makes it possible not only to write in the voices of chefs, but to actually channel them as cooks.

More

The best part of Thanksgiving— which Jimmah and I didn’t get to celebrate until Saturday— is the leftovers. Here’s two of our favourite recipes for using up that turkey:

Turkey Tettrazini

and be sure to save the carcass for turkey stock, you’ll need it for this:

Italian Turkey Soup.

What are your tricks for using up the leftovers? Post your favourite recipes below!

Recently posted at an underground website that posts hacks against hackers.

Anarchist Toll House Cookie Recipe:

* Locate the Toll House

* Post time and location for direct action against Toll House at 4chan

* Surround Toll House and demand the liberation of their cookies!

* Throw chairs through plate glass window of Toll House (even if cookies are liberated)

Alternative recipe if Toll House not found:

* Get some dough

* Get some chocolate chips

* Get an oven

* Mix the dough and the chips however you like. DON’T LET THE POLICE STATE OPPRESS YOU BY TELLING YOU HOW TO MAKE YOUR COOKIES.

* Use the oven to cook the cookies. Set it to whatever temperature you want. If they burn yell “Fuck Yea!”