Salacious Cotton Candy and Holiday Brews: This Week in Food Bloggery

Cue the Barry White.

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Highlights from SFoodie and beyond this week:

1. This week, our Portland-bound beer columnist, Brian Yaeger, conducted his last blind tasting of local and nationally distributed holiday beers, and found that the Jews outshone the Christians and heathens alike. Pick up a six-pack of Jewbelation 14 for your company's holiday party, and you'll be making an aesthetic statement as well as a cultural one.

2. I can barely remember details from the Modern Family episode I watched earlier this week, but Carina Ost was able to recall 10 favorite food-television moments of the past year. It's a parade of breakdowns and smackdowns that may energize you for yet another (yawn) 22 hours of Top Chef. And the Real Housewives cotton-candy clip has seared itself onto my cortex.

Clarine's florentines.

​3. Alex Hochman celebrates the holidays with his kids by taking them out to a longtime San Francisco favorite, one that rarely gets any press: The Matterhorn. It makes sense that kids love fondue. You get to play with special apparatus, the potential for disastrous mess-making is high, and melted cheese on bread is practically tomato-less pizza. 

4. SFoodie's Advent Calendar, our monthlong survey of special-edition holiday savories and sweets, continues this week with things like truffled mortadella and florentine cookies. You'll find the full list of advent-calendar items at the bottom of today's plum-pudding post.

5. The San Francisco Public Library is launching a fascinating exhibition and series of lectures called San Francisco Eats. On display at the Main Library are photos, menus, and ephemera representing 160 years of this food-obsessed city's history. The library's website has the full list of talks and demonstrations, which continue until January 29. Combine a trip to the library with an outing to SF MOMA's How Wine Became Modern exhibit, and you have a full day of educational activities.