[Video: Jessica Leibowitz]

If you've been following knife skills, you may be thinking, "Wait a minute, we've seen this all before!" And you're right. But this time we've upgraded technology and put it in video. Enjoy!

If there's one knife skill that can save you money and make you look cool at the same time, it's breaking down a chicken. Consider that boneless breasts often cost around three times more than whole chicken does.

So for the same price as a two-pack of breasts, you can buy a whole chicken, which comes with those same breasts, plus two legs, and a back. And wait for it—if you're really lucky, you'll get a free liver, heart, and gizzard thrown in to sweeten the deal! I know girls (named Chichi) who'd get the whole chicken just to get her hands on some of those delicious gizzards!

Of course, if you don't know how to break the chicken down, all this is not too useful. That's where this guide comes in. Just follow the video, and you'll be breaking down chickens like the pros.

Shopping and Storage

Just two quick tips here:

• Buy air-chilled chickens. Air-chilled chickens like those from Bell and Evans and several other "premium" brands are chilled with cold air after slaughter rather than being dumped into an ice bath like the mass-market brands. This means that they come to the market with less retained water. Not only does this give you a better value (since you're not paying for water weight), but more importantly, you get more concentrated flavor.
• Avoid kosher birds. Kosher birds have been heavily salted before packaging in order to remove excess liquid. While in some cases, this is desirable—such as when you are roasting it—in other cases, the excess salt can ruin a recipe. A braised chicken recipe where the braising liquid is subsequently reduced can get far too salty from the excess salt within the chicken. It also limits your stock-making ability, since a salty stock cannot be reduced. You're better off buying a regular bird and salting or brining it yourself if the recipe calls for it.

As for all your other options, I personally prefer to pay the extra money for premium brands of free range or specialty heirloom breeds because of the improved flavor they offer. There's not much worse than bad chicken. Maybe bad margaritas, but that's about it.

[Photographs: Jessica Leibowitz]

Whether you spell it portabella, portobello, or portobella, nobody can tell you you're wrong. Here's another place you can be right: when you tell someone that portabella, white mushrooms, button mushrooms, champignon mushrooms, and crimini are all actually the same fungus. The difference in color on the cap between white and crimini comes down to the specific strain of Agaricus bisporus they're cultivated from, while a portabella is simply a mature version of the same fungus.

Vegetarians seem to love them because of their meaty texture and convenient burger-bun size. I like them because they taste good. Whether you plan on stuffing and roasting them, grilling them whole, or—my faorite way—slicing them thinly and sautéeing them until they're deep brown and deglazing with some soy sauce, stock, and butter to form the base of an awesome steak sauce, you need to start by cleaning them.

The stems of large portabella, while technically edible, can be woody and fibrous and are usually discarded (or used to flavor stock). Likewise, the dark black gills can be eaten, but they'll turn your food a nasty, murky, scuzzy brown, so it's best to scrape'em out. The key here is to pry with the tip of a spoon instead of just going at it with the side of the spoon. It should come out in neat, discrete chunks instead of staining the whole cap (and your fingers).

When cooking the cap whole, it's best to score it lightly on the top side. This allows steam from inside to escape more easily, which both hastens cooking, and makes it more even. It also prevents the mushroom from distorting as it shrinks while it cooks. If you're the type who marinates, it'll also provide access channels for flavors to penetrate more deeply.

Shopping and Storage

If possible, it's best to buy portabellas from the loose mushroom bin instead of the pre-packaged caps. You'll be able to evaluate them better. When picking a good portabella, the first thing you should check for is a firm cap and stem. Shriveled or soft caps should be avoided. Next, flip the mushroom over and take a look at the gill structure. It should be dry, with a faint pinkish hue when you hold it in the light. If it's deep dark black or wet looking, the mushroom is past its prime.

Mushrooms can be stored whole in the refrigerator in an open plastic bag (they need ventilation). They should hold for a few days if you got'em nice and fresh. The gills are usually the first part of the cap to go, so removing them can actually extend the shelf life quite a bit—up to a week or more.

Finally, mushrooms are extremely porous, so if you do decide to marinate them, it's best not to marinate for too long or they'll suck up more juice than they can handle. About 30 minutes before grilling or roasting should be just about right.

[Video: Jessica Leibowitz of My Camera Eats Food]

To be honest, pearl onions are available pretty much year-round at the same quality level, but they're especially useful in winter when other vegetables aren't in their prime. Available in white, yellow, or red (just like their full-sized brethren!), they are generally milder than full-sized onions and take on a noticeable sweetness when cooked.

My favorite way to prepare them is to slowly cook them down in butter until they're deeply browned and sweet. They also go great in stews and braises, like a good coq au vin. The only annoying part is that it takes an awful lot of work to clean something that gets eaten in a single bite.

Here's a little trick to help you remove the skin easily with your fingers by blanching the onions first. Watch the video for full instructions.

P.S. Peeling pearl onions isn't too hard, especially with this trick, but here's a little secret: frozen peeled pearl onions work really well for almost all applications. I often buy them when feeling a bit lazy. shh.

Shopping and Storage

Most people don't have too many options when looking for pearl onions. They come in plastic mesh bags already bunched together. If you have the option of picking them loose, look for onions that are identical in size to help them cook evenly. The onions should also be firm with no soft spots.

Unlike regular onions, where the variation in flavor between colors is quite pronounced, with pearl onions, the difference between yellow, white, and red varieties is not too significant.

[Video: Jessica Leibowitz of My Camera Eats Food]

Endive comes in a few varieties. Curly endive, known as frisée in France and often called chicory in the U.S., has tightly bunched, frizzy leaves. Generally, only the tender yellow and pale green leaves from the center are eaten as a salad green (try some with duck confit or a poached egg—or both), and they can sometimes be tough to come across in a normal supermarket. Belgian endives are far more readily available in the States. Pale yellow with an elongated bulbous shape, they are made up of a series of tightly overlapping leaves.

The individual leaves are crunchy and slightly bitter, and make a good addition to a crudité platter. They go particularly well with creamy dressings and dips.

You can also slice the leaves in either direction to form the base of a salad. My favorite way to eat them is with a slightly sweet, nut-based vinaigrette, like my Toasted Almond Vinaigrette.

They also have quite a few cooked applications—you can braise endives whole in stock or milk, for example, or sautée the leaves and purée them into a soup. Try the leaves as a pizza topping too. They sweeten up like radicchio as they char.

Shopping and Storage

Look for endives that are free from blemishes and discolorations, feel heavy for their size, and have densely packed leaves. Pay particular attention to the feathery yellow edges of the leaves for signs of discoloration or wilting. Often, the outermost layers of the endive might show a touch of browning, but the inner layers will be fine. Peel back the outer leaves slightly to check for this.

Kept in a plastic vegetable bag in the crisper drawer of the fridge, endives should last a week or so when whole. Don't separate the leaves or cut them until just before serving, however, as they'll rapidly start browning.

[Photographs and Video: Jessica Leibowitz of mycameraeatsfood.com]

Leeks are like the Lord Thistelwick Flanders of the onion family. The refined and aloof European cousin who needs to be nudged before his true onion character emerges. But once you start cooking with them, they offer a variety of characteristics that you don't find in regular onions.

First off, texture. When you cook down a regular onion, it becomes very soft, or it completely disintegrates. Leeks, on the other hand, retain a bit of tender bite, acquiring a pleasing texture more similar to that of, say, cooked cabbage. This property makes them fantastic whenever you want to add nice mild onion flavor without the stringiness or pulpiness of regular onions. Cooked very slowly in emulsified butter (often described on menus as "leek fondue"), they are incredible.

Flavorwise, they are far more mild than a regular onion, without the sweetness of a shallot. Slightly grassy and vegetal, they are known as the "soup onion" for a reason—they are great in soups and stews. Their flavor tends to sit back and support other flavors without overwhelming them.

Leeks are also quite versatile. They can be stewed, braised whole, roasted, sautéed, and as any chef from the early '90s can tell you, deep fried into crisp frizzles to add texture to soups and salads (though your soup will end up looking like Don King).

Shopping and Storage

Look for leeks with tight, bright green tops that aren't wilting at all. The white bases should be bright white—yellowing is a sign of age. At the supermarket, most leeks these days are pristine with no dirt at all, but if you do find muddy leeks, it's ok, and should be expected, as leeks grow pretty deep in sandy soil. Just be sure to carefully wash away all grit and sand before cooking with them (I go over this in the video).

Since they don't have the robust dried exterior of a standard onion, the shelf like of leeks is far shorter. Leeks can be stored in a plastic vegetable bag in the crisper drawer for about 2 weeks or so, though 1 week is more normal. Generally, I buy them as I need them instead of treating them as a pantry staple.

Only the tender white and light green bottoms are actually eaten, but the fibrous green upper parts still have plenty of flavor and can be added to the pot next time you make stock.

And finally, I had a bad cold this week (which explains the soup-friendly leek video), so please welcome Robyn Lee in the premier of her voiceover career. One man's hoarse throat is another woman's career-launcher.

When do you guys pick leeks over regular onions?

[Photographs and Video: Jessica Leibowitz of mycameraeatsfood.com]

Fennel is a generally divisive vegetable. Crisp, with a distinct anise flavor, it can be overpowering for some people. I like my fennel in small doses. Sliced super thin on a mandoline and tossed with citrus segments and a nice lemony vinaigrette, it's a great winter salad that goes well with sausages, terrines, and other charcuterie. Just after we shot this video, we threw the sliced fennel together with the pomegranate we'd just seeded and tossed it all with olive oil and vinegar. Delicious.

Seafood is another natural partner. Stew some fennel and onions with a can of tomatoes and a pinch of saffron, and you've got the perfect base for a seafood stew (or even chicken, if you'd like). If you manage to find some nice young fennel bulbs, try roasting them whole with a bit of olive oil. They sweeten up just like an onion and develop a good, caramelized crust.

The frilly green fronds that grow out of the top are perfectly edible and make a pretty garnish. Even the dark green stalks can be used. Save them and add them to chicken, vegetable, or fish stocks to add a slight aniseed undertone. I also like to slice them up very thin and cook them down slowly in simple syrup until they become tender enough to eat and use them as a garnish on ice cream or other desserts.

Of course, like most vegetables, they're really healthy too.

Shopping and Storage

With fennel, just like the characters in an episode of Thundercats: the good guys and the bad guys are easy to identify. Look for fennel bulbs that are pale green or white with no discoloration. The first thing you'll notice when fennel is past its prime is browning at the edges of each layer, so check there first. The layers should be tightly packed, and the fronds should be bright green and vigorous.

In its whole form, fennel will last about a week in a loosely closed plastic bag in the vegetable crisper door in the refrigerator, but once you cut it, it rapidly browns, so chop it just before using.

What do you all like doing with your fennel?

Have you ever tried to make a mushroom out of George Washington's head on a dollar bill?

Well, we're not going to do that today, nor are we going to do the opposite, which is significantly more difficult (and altogether more impressive). Instead, we're going to learn how to cut button mushrooms into two basic shapes, which for most practical purposes, is all you need*.

*With the exception of finely chopped mushrooms for stuffings, meatballs, or duxelles, which you should be making in your food processor anyway.

Quartered mushrooms are great for tossing with a bit of olive oil and salt and roasting in the oven. They cook down and brown while still retaining enough moisture that their tenderness and meaty quality is preserved. They are also great sauteed, though it does take some time for the copious amounts of water they release to evaporate before they start with any kind of browning.

If you want a quick cooking shape that'll brown relatively fast and work its way into sauces or soups nicely, sliced mushrooms are what you're looking for.

No matter what shape you want, the key is to first trim off the stem of your shrooms. This not only removes any woody, dried out, or dirty sections, but more importantly it also creates a flat base for your mushroom to rest on, making slicing much easier and safer. See the video for full instructions.

Shopping and Storage

While the method above is demonstrated with button mushrooms, it'll work equally well with cremini. When shopping for mushrooms, look for ones that don't have any grayish-brown spots on their caps that can mark decay. Examine the moist area near the gills under the cap as well, as it'll often start to turn before the rest of the shroom. The bottom of the stem can be a little discolored, but should not be overly dry, mushy, or starting to shred apart.

As for dirt, it is no indication either way. Obviously, cleaner mushrooms are better to work with, as they require less cleaning, but a little dirt on the cap or clustered near the stem is no problem.

Once you get the mushrooms home, store them in a plastic bag with the top left open or in a perforated plastic container in the vegetable drawer of your refrigerator. Fresh mushrooms should last three to five days under optimal conditions.

To Wash or Not To Wash?

You may have read that rinsing mushrooms under water is a big no-no as they'll absorb liquid and become difficult to cook. I'd always wondered about this myself, so I did a couple of tests, both roasting and sautéeing mushrooms that had been rinsed under cool running water and spun dry in a salad spinner versus those that had been painstakingly wiped clean with a mushroom brush and a damp paper towel. I made sure to weigh the mushrooms at each stage to monitor how much liquid they absorbed and exuded.

First off, it's true: mushrooms do absorb water when you wash them, but it's only about 2% of their total weight, or translated to volume, that's about 1 1/2 teaspoons of water per pound, which in turn translates to an extra 15 to 30 seconds of cooking time.

Bottom line? The best way to clean mushrooms is to wash them in cold running water, transfer them to a salad spinner, spin'em dry as best you can, then cook them just as you normally would, tacking on an extra few seconds to help them get rid of the extra moisture.

[Video: Robyn Lee and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

A chicken paillard is just a fancy french way of describing pounded chicken cutlets. As a technique for home cooks, it's one of the most useful; Once you know how to do it, a hot chicken dinner is only a few minutes away. When pounded to a quarter inch, chicken breast takes about four minutes total to cook in a hot skillet.

Once the chicken is cooked, throw a splash of wine into the pot with a knob of butter, put everything on a plate with a nice green salad on the side, and you've just saved yourself $13.99 on an entrée.

The most difficult step is the cutting: It requires a sharp knife and a little practice. If you're still a little green in the kitchen, you'll probably make a few holes in your chicken breasts before you get the hang of it—no worries, they'll still taste just as good.

Once you've got the breast split, pounding is fun and easy. The key is not to pound too hard. Hard pounding can make holes in your meat and gives you less control over the final thickness. Easy does it, ok?

[Video: Robyn Lee and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Our turkey shopping and cooking guide will be coming tomorrow, but here's your chance to bone up on your carving skills. As nice as it is to carve a turkey at the table, it's really much easier and less messy to do it in the kitchen and transfer it all to a platter for easy serving tableside. If you want to be all fancy and impressive, you can "present" the bird before you carve it, then retreat back into the kitchen to carve while grandpa gets his second martini in the bag.

Have you ever sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, assembled your plate, taken a bite, and thought, This turkey is okay, but it's just too moist and evenly cooked? Me neither. Let me make a prediction: You will never have that reaction to a traditional roast turkey.

Here's the problem with turkey: above 145°F or so, white meat begins to dry out. Dark meat, with its connective tissue, on the other hand, has to be cooked to at least 165°F. How do you cook a single bird to two different temperatures? It's difficult at best, and downright impossible at worst, even more so when you consider the variation in shape and thickness of turkey meat, especially on the breast of a large bird.

Turkey Talk

[Photographs and Video: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Robyn Lee]

Separating the dark meat from the white is the only way to nail the 20-degree temperature differential between properly cooked thighs and breasts. As a delicious added plus, separated legs can be slow-cooked to break down their connective tissue and provide a wonderfully silky mouthfeel.

As for the reasons to tie the breast into a cylindrical roast, look no further than Kenji's post on turkey-stuffed turkey from last year:

Even cooking. Because of its symmetrical shape, the turkey heats through along its entire length at the same rate. Nobody gets stuck with a dry piece.

Better seasoning. By removing the breasts from the carcass, you expose more surface area, allowing the seasonings to reach the space between the breasts, hence reaching the center of the turkey roll. Similarly, brining is more effective (though with low temperature cooking and an even shape, brining is wholly unnecessary).

Crisper skin. While it's possible to get crisp skin on this beast by popping it back into a 500°F oven for a few minutes just before serving, an even better way to do it is to sear it in butter in a big skillet on the stovetop--an endeavor that's reasonably simple with the breast's reduced size and more convenient shape.

Easier carving. With no bones and an even shape, carving this turkey is as simple as slicing a tenderloin.

Better gravy. With the entire carcass of the bird at your disposal, it's easy to make a delicious, very turk-ey gravy. I make mine by chopping up the bones, browning them, making a stock with aromatics, enhancing with some marmite and soy sauce, then thickening. Delicious!

Your family will like you more. Unless you're a control-freak kitchen nazi (I am).

The butchery itself is actually pretty simple, as the video above will demonstrate. Just remember to use a very sharp knife and to use your hands as much as possible.

After separating the appendages and deboning the breasts, I assemble the roast by stacking the breast halves on top of each other smooth-side-out, making sure the thin end of each half is aligned with the thick end of the other half. This guarantees relatively even thickness throughout its length. I wrap the cylinder back up in the skin and truss it with a series of half-hitch knots or. If that's not your bag, you can use several simple granny knots all along the length of the roast.

The easiest way to cook the bird is to roast all of the pieces in a 300°F oven on a couple of rimmed baking sheets fitted with a rack. Pull out the breast when it reaches 145° (tent it with foil to keep it warm) and the legs/wings when they hit 165°F. After that, crank the oven back up to 500°F, and about 15 minutes before you're ready to serve, bang everything back inside to crisp up the exterior skin (or you can sear the breast piece in hot butter in a skillet). All told, roasting should take less than 2 hours for a 12 to 15 pound bird, which is significant savings over a traditional roast turkey. Carve the bird, and serve.

When you take your first bite of juicy, evenly cooked meat, I think you'll agree it's well worth the extra effort of butchery. Well, unless the Swedish Chef is on. Priorities, people.

About the author: When not eating or cooking, Aaron Mattis finds time to study economics. His recipe column, Taking the Heat, runs biweekly in the Scarsdale Inquirer.

[Video: Jessica Leibowitz]

Cutting a chiffonade (that's super-thin ribbons) of leafy herbs is a nice way to get their flavor evenly distributed around the dish. It's pretty too. The only problem is that a lot of these herbs like mint, certain types of basil, and sage have a thick stem running through the center of each leaf, which can lead to tough, stringy bits in your food. It's best to remove these.

The fastest way to do it is to stack the leaves a few at a time, fold them over to secure them, then chiffonade them from one side, stopping just short of the central stem. Flip the leaves over and repeat on the other side. You should be left with just the central stem, which you can then discard.

Watch the video for more details.

Shopping and Storage

As with all herbs, look for bright, firm leaves and stems that stand to attention. There should be no browning. A little dirt on the leaves is ok, and you should always wash your picked herbs and spin them in a salad spinner before using to get rid of any dirt or sand that might be clinging to them. Nobody likes sand in their pasta or julep.

For relatively short term storage, store the herbs in a loosely closed plastic bag in the vegetable crisper. It should last at least four to five days. For longer term storage, you've got two options. You can either pick the leaves, rinse them, dry them, then roll them up in a damp paper towel placed inside a zipper-lock bag, or store the whole bunch with the stems in a glass of water. Place an opened plastic bag over the top of the cup. Either way, the herbs should remain fresh for at least a week.

[Video: Jessica Leibowitz of my camera eats food]

All meat—beef, chicken, human, whatever—has a grain to it; It's the direction that the major muscle fibers run in. As we've demonstrated in the past, the angle at which you hold your knife in relation to this grain while cutting has a pretty profound effect on the tenderness of the meat. Cut in the same direction as the grain, and your meat comes out tough and ropey. Cut against the grain, and you shorten the muscle fibers, effectively tenderizing the meat.

The goal with any stir-fry is to cut the food into bite-size pieces that will cook rapidly and remain tender. This means that more than almost any other cooking method, cutting the meat against the grain into the right shape is absolutely essential. This video will show you how it's done.

Shopping and Storage

When it comes to stir-fries, the best cuts of beef are ones that are loose-textured enough to absorb the flavorings, but beefy enough to stand up on its own. Because you're slicing them so thin, expensive super-tender cuts like strip or tenderloin are overkill. Much better are the so-called butcher's cuts. These are my favorites:

• Skirt steak, also labeled as "fajita meat" is a cut from the plate, the region near the belly, just behind the front leg of the cow. It comes in a thin strip about 18 inches long and 5 inches wide, with the grain running the short way. It's a little tough but has a deep, robust beef flavor, making it perfect for stir-fries.
• Flank steak used to be one of the cheapest cuts at the butcher until it saw a huge boom in popularity in the late '90s and early aughts. Nowadays, it commands prices nearly as high as loin cuts. Its advantage? You can find it pretty much anywhere. Unlike skirt steak, its grain runs the long way. The flavor is lightly metallic and not quite as robust as skirt.
• Hanger steak, known in french as the onglet, used to be strictly the domain of chefs and butchers, but is becoming more and more widely available these days. Cut from the diaphragm, it is extraordinarily beefy, and when cut right (as I'm sure you'll do after watching the video), is as tender as you'd like It's got a slightly odd prism shape which can make the grain a little tough to identify. This is probably my favorite cut of beef for quick cooking.
• Flap Meat, also sold as sirloin tip in the New England area comes from the sirloin (that's top side of the cow, right in front of its butt). It's tough to track down, but if you can, jump on it, particularly if you can get it as a whole cut rather than the cubes or strips it often comes in. Its texture and flavor are similar to hanger (a little more mild), but its large, uniform size makes it much easier to butcher.

Like all meats, beef should be kept well wrapped and used within a few days of purchase. Don't slice the meat into strips until you are ready to cook it. Pre-slicing will increase its surface area, increasing oxidation, which can cause the meat to discolor or develop livery off-flavors.

[Video: Jessica Leibowitz of my camera eats food]

I flat out love brussels sprouts. They are easily the most favorite of my favorite vegetables. When properly seared and caramelized they turn sweet and nutty like nothing else. Of course, if you overcook them or allow them to steam in their own liquid, they turn funky and unpleasant like nothing else, or at least like nothing fit to be eaten.

Properly cooking them requires two things: high heat, and proper preparation. Today we're gonna focus on the latter (don't worry, we'll come to the actual cooking soon enough).

The key to getting your sprouts to taste great is to maximize their surface area in contact with the pan. There are two ways to do this. First, you can simply trim them down and split them in half. Cook them cut side down in plenty of fat (olive oil is good, bacon fat is better, duck fat is the best) until the entire cut face has turned crisp and nearly blackened. Delicious.

Want to further increase surface area? It's a little more work, but you can also cut each head into fine shreds (call them chiffonade if you want to sound fancy). You can't cook quite as many in the same pan this way (lest they start the dreaded steam cycle), but you'll end up with extraordinarily whispy, crisp, tender shreds that are so good you'll wonder why you ever hated brussels sprouts. Watch the full video above for a demo.

Shopping and Storage

My favorite way to get brussels sprouts is from the farmer's market, still attached to their stalk. They just look phenomenally cool, like a little Christmas trees with edible balls. The sprouts also tend to last a bit longer on the stalk than when bought loose.

Whether loose or on the stalk, look for small, tight heads with minimal discoloration. The outer leaves of brussels sprouts, like many cabbages, will start to develop black or dark brown spots before the rest of it starts to go bad. The exterior leaves should be bright green while the inner leaves should go from pale yellow to white.

Once you get them home, store brussels sprouts loosely wrapped in plastic (a plastic baggie with the top left open is ideal) in the vegetable crisper drawer, where they should remain good for at least two weeks. If they begin to discolor, simply peel off the exterior leaves until you get to the first clean layer.

We have a new video and photo intern! Jessica Leibowitz of the blog My Camera Eats Food will be dropping by every week to shoot videos and photos for the site. Welcome Jessica!

[Video: Jessica Leibowitz]

This video is for you unlucky souls who never got to carve a real pumpkin as a kid (hello jack-o-lantern face stickers!), but are now too old to admit to their friends that they don't really know how it's done. Watch this video in the privacy of your own home, then head out to that pumpkin carving party with confidence!

Shopping and Storage

As far as shopping for and storing a pumpkin goes, there isn't much to say that hasn't already been said here and here in our guides to pumpkin carving. Here's the summary:

Look for pumpkins with:

• Firm, smooth skin
• At least one even face to make carving easier
• A green stem, not a brown or rotting one (and never lift it by the stem)
• A heavy feel for its size
• No bruises, soft spots, or lacerations on the skin—it will rot from those spots

If your carved pumpkin starts to shrivel, you can revive it by giving it a bath in ice water for an hour or so (a cooler or bathtub both work fine for this). Lightly spray the cut surface of your pumpkin with vegetable oil to prevent moisture loss.

VIEW SLIDESHOW: How to Carve a Pumpkin like a Pro

[Photographs: Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, unless otherwise stated.]

Yesterday we brought you the basic guide to pumpkin carving. Ain't no shame in tracing the classic triangle eyes and snaggly-tooth mouth. But if you're looking for a more advanced, knock-your-neighbors'-socks-off-o'-lantern, here is a step-by-step guide to carving more detailed designs, with examples at the end to inspire you. With some X-acto knives, drawing markers, and your new skills, you'll be able to whittle away at that gourd like a pro.

About the authors/carvers: Maniac Pumpkin Carvers is a Brooklyn-based duo comprised of Marc Evan and Chris Soria who operate out of a full creative studio. The Maniacs began carving nightmares into children's minds, while still in high school. They each paid their way through art school working lengthy stints at some of New York City's best bars and restaurants. Now, they are proud to be known as professional pumpkin carvers. What do they do outside of October? It's the most popular question they get asked! You may find Marc and Chris painting murals in public spaces, or working on any of a number of other creative endeavors.