Click the play button to see us cook the two finalists for Your Best Shrimp Recipe: EBeier's Southern Sherried Shrimp and Helen's Spicy Shrimp. Watch as Merrill demonstrates her "interesting" lemon zesting technique, and Amanda nearly sets the neighborhood on fire. Yes, we know it's a little scattered, but hey, it's our first one -- wait until next time! 

We've seen some great submissions to the recipe contests so far. This past week, we received a particularly large and promising selection, and we'd like to thank everyone who participated. Although we can only choose two finalists for each theme, we do have a way of recognizing other noteworthy competitors. Each week, we select our Editors' Picks: recipes that we haven't tested but that seem promising and/or unique. There's no set number; one week we may choose ten, and the next week none. This week, we chose quite a few. You can see all of our selections, past and present, by going to The Recipes and clicking on "Editors' Picks" beneath the search field. 

In case you haven't had a chance to check out the box of gray text on the right side of our home page, we thought we'd fill you in on all of the cool stuff that you can win if you submit a recipe to one of food52's weekly recipe contests.

Not only will all of the winning recipes go into the first food52 cookbook, to be published by HarperStudio in 2010, but all finalists will receive a copy of the book. (And yes, if you're a finalist 5 times, you get 5 copies!)

What's more, our contest sponsor OXO is creating custom prize packages from their inventory of fantastic kitchen tools, which will be sent to all of the finalists as well as the Wildcard winners. Recent finalists for the Best Burger contest won a Digital Instant Read Thermometer, a BBQ Turner, a Silicone Oven Mitt and a set of Corn Holders. Also included in each package is a beautiful food52 bookmark -- perfect for keeping track of your favorite recipes.

So keep submitting recipes to the contests, because you just may win some great loot!

Congratulations to this week's winners!

Leslie won the contest for Your Best Salad Dressing with Salad Dressing

Heather won the contest for Your Best Cherry Recipe with Roasted Duck Breast with Sour Cherries

We asked them both to answer a few questions about cooking and eating.

- Merrill

Bavarian cuisine has gained a real toehold in New York City as of late. Trendy new restaurants like Seasonal and Radegast Hall are dishing up heaping platefuls of brats, schnitzel and goulash. Brooklyn even has it's own brand-new Schnitzel Truck,which announces its current location via Twitter.

"What caught our eye is that Hesser and Stubbs have started uploading test videos: an intro to Food 52, and a video tour of Amanda's envy-inducing kitchen." -Adam Kuban, SeriousEats.com 

- Amanda

Yes, you're supposed to clean your grill as soon as you're done using it. But since that never happens in my house, I needed a way to scrape it down right before firing it up again. Merrill taught me a quick and effective trick for doing this: you crumple a piece of aluminum foil, then using tongs to grasp it, you use the foil to "scrub" the surface of the grill rack. It's amazing how well it works -- scraping up even the stickiest bits in just a few seconds.

Thanks to the creativity of 10x (our web developers), we have a couple of features here at food52 that we think are really innovative and fun to use. Today, we thought we'd highlight one in particular in case you haven't already stumbled across it yourselves: the "Cooking View" option under the "Print/View" button found on every one of our recipe pages.

"[Amanda Hesser's] new food site looks kind of brilliant." -Jane Black of the Washington Post (via Twitter)